Name Bernhard Hering | ||
Cell Therapy for Diabetes | Bernhard J Hering, MD
Dr Bernhard J. Hering is Professor of Surgery and Medicine and Scientific Director of the Schulze Diabetes Institute at the University of Minnesota, where he holds the Eunice L. Dwan Chair in Diabetes Research and the McKnight Presidential Chair in Transplantation Science.
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Biography
He received his medical degree in 1983 at Justus Liebig University Medical School, in Giessen, Germany, where he also did his medical residency, followed by training in endocrinology.
Academic work
Hering is an internationally renowned specialist in islet cell transplantation, with his research focusing on innovating and implementing cell-based therapeutics into specialty care biologics for type 1 diabetes. The human islet transplant protocol that Dr. Hering and his team have refined has markedly improved short-term and long-term clinical outcomes in patients with type 1 diabetes; key elements of this protocol have been adopted for the Phase 3 licensure trial of human islets by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored multi-center Clinical Islet Transplant Consortium.
Hering is also widely recognized as a leader in islet xenotransplantation. His research group was the first to demonstrate long-term diabetes reversal after adult pig islet xenotransplants in nonhuman primates, an accomplishment that has reinvigorated the field of xenotransplantation. Hering co-founded Spring Point Project, an organization established to generate designated pathogen-free, ‘medical-grade’ source pigs for planned clinical translation of islet xenotransplantation. To minimize the need for recipient immunosuppression, Hering is partnering with leaders in immunology to integrate preemptive treatment with donor antigen and immune-engineering of donor islets into a safe and successful rejection prophylaxis strategy.
He has been invited to advise the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institute of Health on issues related to xenotransplantation and cellular therapies for diabetes. He has sat on the editorial boards of several professional journals and is the author or co-author of 25 book chapters and of over 250 articles, including articles in Nature, Nature Medicine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Hering has been a long-term member of the steering committee of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Immune Tolerance Network; he currently serves on the steering committees of the NIH Clinical Islet Transplant Consortium, NIH Nonhuman Primate Transplantation Collaborative Study Group, and NIH Type 1 Diabetes TrialNet. Hering is also the Medical Director of the NIH Collaborative Islet Transplant Registry (CITR). He was President of the Cell Transplant Society and currently serves as Immediate-Past President of the International Xenotransplantation Association (IXA) and as President of the International Pancreas and Islet Transplant Association (IPITA).
In recognition for his outstanding contributions to islet transplantation, Hering was named in 2012 by U.S. News & World Report and Castle Connolly Medical Ltd. one of America’s Top Doctors, a distinction reserved for the top 1% of physicians across the U.S. for their specialty.