Dr. Paul Terasaki, a University of California, Los Angeles researcher, professor emeritus, philanthropist and alumnus who was a transplant medicine pioneer, died this week. He was 86.
Terasaki developed a tissue-typing test in 1964 that became the international standard method of determining compatibility of organ donors with potential recipients. Heart, liver, kidney, pancreas, lung and bone marrow donors and recipients have been typed using Terasaki’s test. He was the first to devise such a method.
Just as each person has a blood type, each person has a tissue type. The latter is much more complicated because more than 1,000 tissue types exist.
In the 1970s, Terasaki created the UCLA Kidney Transplant Registry, the first and largest of its kind in the world until the establishment of federal registries. The UCLA data about kidney recipients submitted from about 200 transplant centers permitted doctors to monitor and improve the outcomes of transplant patients.
Terasaki started a company called One Lambda in 1984 with help from former students. One Lambda played a central role in the advancement of tissue typing and provided transplant centers with tools to better match their patients.
“Paul was a groundbreaking scientist,” said Dr. Victoria Sork, dean of life sciences at UCLA. “His work has saved countless lives.”
In 2010, Terasaki donated $50 million to UCLA, one of the largest, single gifts in the university’s history, resulting in a new life sciences building to be named for him. The facility houses laboratories where scientists conduct studies integrating fields such as cell biology, neuroscience, genomics and stem cell research. Terasaki’s donation also endowed a chair in surgery at UCLA’s medical school and financed a pair of postdoctoral fellowships to further research in liver and intestinal transplantation.
