R. Mark Ghobrial, MD, PhD

After receiving his Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery degrees from Cairo University Medical School in Cairo, Egypt, Dr. Ghobrial completed several surgical residencies in the United Kingdom and the United States. While a surgery resident at University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, Texas, he completed a PhD in Immunology at the UT Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in 1994. After residency, he accepted a position as clinical instructor in the Department of Surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and was awarded a Dumont-UCLA Transplant Fellowship. He received his full professorship in 2005 and served as Director of the Pancreas Transplant Program and Living Donor Liver Transplantation, and Service Director for Liver, Pancreas, and Small Bowel Transplantation. He was recruited to the Houston Methodist Hospital in 2008.

One of the primary goals of Dr. Ghobrial´s research is to increase donor tolerance to organ transplants and allografts. Dr. Ghobrial has shown in preclinical studies that tolerizing the host to dominant donor epitopes induces tolerance in the recipient. By engineering chimeric proteins, or proteins that contain sequences from both donor and recipient, and exposing the recipient to these proteins prior to tissue graft, peripheral, long-term tolerance is induced. Dr. Ghobrial also has a long-standing interest in the effects of Hepatitis (B and C) on transplantation patients.