Dirk J. van der Windt, M.D., Ph.D.

Assistant Professor
Department: Surgery
Programs: Cellular Injury, End Organ Disease

 

 

Research Interests:

Dr. van der Windt received his MSc from the Netherlands Institute for Health Sciences in Rotterdam, and his MD and PhD in Transplant Immunology from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Following his Residency in General Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh, and fellowship training in Abdominal Transplant and Hepatobiliary surgery at the University of Michigan, Dr. van der Windt joined the MUSC faculty in 2022.

As a practicing transplantation surgeon with a background in immunology, Dr. van der Windt’s research is focused developing innovative treatment strategies to intervene in the sequence of cell death, inflammation, antigen presentation, rejection, chronic allograft fibrosis and dysfunction in liver transplantation, and thereby prolong graft and patient survival. Research in his laboratory is particularly focused on the the ex-vivo treatment of the liver during normothermic machine perfusion (NMP), to optimize a liver graft for transplantation. NMP is a novel method for organ preservation and for viability assessment prior to transplantation, however, the use of NMP as a platform to actively treat the liver is still greatly underutilized.

Current projects in Dr. van der Windt’s lab study the role of circulating, cell-free DNA in the pathogenesis of sterile inflammation and liver injury. The lab will test the utility of ex-vivo treatments targeting cell-free DNA to reduce liver injury and improve graft survival and function.

Publications:

PubMed Collection