Dr. Tatsuo Kawai, MD, PhD, is a Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and holds the A. Benedict Cosimi Chair in Transplant Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). He also serves as Director of the Legorreta Center for Clinical Transplant Tolerance. Since joining the MGH Transplant Surgery Division in 1997, Dr. Kawai has developed a groundbreaking clinical protocol to induce immunological tolerance in HLA-mismatched kidney transplantation, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2008.

In the field of xenotransplantation, Dr. Kawai achieved more than two years of survival for genetically edited kidney xenografts in nonhuman primates (Nature, 2023). Most recently, in March 2024, he participated in the world’s first kidney xenotransplantation using a pig with 69 genomic edits in a living patient with end-stage renal disease (NEJM, 2025). He has since performed three additional clinical kidney xenotransplants and continues his preclinical research to further optimize genetic modifications in donor pigs for future clinical applications.