Dorry Segev

Dorry Segev (born 1973?, Israel) is an Israeli-born transplant surgeon who helped advance efforts to ensure the equitable and optimal use of donor organs and who developed innovative approaches to organ transplantation, particularly for patients infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). He was especially well known for having performed, in 2016, the first organ transplants in the United States between an HIV-positive donor and HIV-positive recipients.

Segev earned B.A. degrees (1992) in computer science and electrical engineering at Rice University and an M.D. (1996) at Johns Hopkins University, where he later also completed a residency and a clinical fellowship. While serving as an associate professor in the department of surgery at Johns Hopkins, he received an M.H.S. (2009) in biostatistics and a Ph.D. (2009) in clinical investigation. He also joined the faculty in the school’s departments of epidemiology and biostatistics and later was associate vice-chair for research and director of the Epidemiology Research Group in Organ Transplantation at Johns Hopkins.

Under Segev’s leadership, the Epidemiology Research Group investigated key questions in organ transplantation, including how best to make transplants available to the greatest number of patients while distributing organs equitably and in a cost-effective manner. As part of that work, Segev helped write and pass legislation for the Charlie W. Norwood Living Organ Donation Act (2007), which optimized the use of live donor kidneys through a national paired donor kidney exchange program. The program gave incompatible donor/recipient pairs an opportunity to match with other incompatible pairs.

Segev and colleagues also investigated the ability of a method known as desensitization to improve survival among kidney transplant patients who had received organs from incompatible donors. In desensitization therapy, antibodies that normally would attack a nonmatched organ are filtered from the recipient’s blood. About half of patients on kidney wait lists are predicted to carry antibodies that attack a donor kidney, resulting in transplant failure. Although desensitization therapy required a living donor and was expensive to perform, its ability to overcome the problem of immune rejection meant that transplant could remain an option for the thousands of immune incompatible patients awaiting kidneys.

In 2016, at Johns Hopkins, Segev, assisted by a team of specialists, transplanted a liver and a kidney from a donor infected with HIV to two recipients who were also infected with the virus. The HIV-to-HIV liver transplant was the first in the world (HIV-to-HIV kidney transplant had been accomplished previously in South Africa). The surgery marked the end of a years-long struggle to gain federal approval to perform the lifesaving procedures in the United States. Segev previously had helped draft legislation for the HIV Organ Policy Equity (HOPE) Act (2013), which made transplants between HIV-positive donors and HIV-positive recipients legal for the first time in the country since being banned in the 1980s.