Assistant Professor of Surgery
Associate Director of the Islet Transplant Program
Director of Islet Processing Research and Development
Klearchos came to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar in 1986. He received his Bachelors, Masters and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (1990, 1992, and 1996, respectively). Then, he completed a 3 year post-doctoral fellowship with Novartis Pharmaceuticals (Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research / Analytics and Bio Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR).
In 1999, he joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a research associate, an appointment, which he still holds on a part-time basis.
At that time, he also became an investigator at the JDRF Center for Islet Transplantation at Harvard Medical School.
From 1999 - 2003, Klearchos was also a Visiting Scientist at Yale University.
Klearchos has more than 15 years of research experience developing strategies for disease management based on tissue engineering and cellular or organ transplantation. His main area of focus has been on insulin replacement therapies for the treatment of diabetes. He has a major, long standing interest is glucose stimulated insulin secretion. He uses this knowledge in beta cell and islet preparation and transplantation and in beta cell engineering. He first became interested in diabetes research while writing his Ph.D. thesis. His thesis focused on the development of NMR based methods for the non-invasive assessment of beta cell quality (in terms of energy utilization at the cellular level, viability and function) and culture of free, encapsulated beta cells in a variety of bioreactor configurations.
Klearchos’ current work focuses on the development of new methods for:
rapidly assessing islet quality in a way that is predictive of transplant outcome (with emphasis on tests based on oxygen consumption rate);
maintaining and improving islet quality at all steps of the process, from pancreas procurement to islet transplantation;
assessing the disposition, mass, and viability of islets and tissues non-invasively after transplantation.
Curriculum Vitae (.doc)