Transplant and immunocompromised infectious diseases

1. To provide clinical consultative services addressing infectious diseases in patients living with immunocompromising conditions (e.g. solid organ or hematopoietic stem cell transplant recipients, patients on biologics or chemotherapy)
2. To conduct clinical research and clinical trials that advance the fields of Transplant and immunocompromised Infectious Diseases.
3. To educate, train, and mentor trainees for future careers in the fields of Transplant and immunocompromised Infectious Diseases.

Dr. Maricar Malinis oversees the Immunocompromised host program as the Medical Director for Transplant and Hematology-Oncology Infectious Diseases. The Yale Transplant & Immunocompromised Infectious Diseases group provides inpatient and outpatient consultative services across the Yale New Haven Hospital campuses. Dedicated inpatient consult services at the York Street campus of Yale New Haven Hospital cater to immunocompromised patients with infections, including a Transplant ID service and a Hematology-Oncology ID service. These teaching services consist of a faculty with expertise in Transplant and/or Hematology-Oncology Infectious Diseases and an infectious disease fellow. Internal medicine residents, medical students and pharmacy trainees may also rotate on this service.

A dedicated outpatient clinic for Transplant and Hematology-Oncology ID is ensconced within the transplant center. In the outpatient clinic, our experts conduct pre-transplant ID evaluations and travel medicine evaluations for immunocompromised individuals and manage pre- and post-transplant infections including ventricular assist device-related infection, invasive fungal infections and donor-derived infections among others. A separate HIV transplant clinic is dedicated to evaluating people living with HIV for transplantation and managing them post-transplant.

Faculty within the Yale Transplant & Immunocompromised Infectious Diseases group conduct a wide variety of research in the field with a focus on clinical outcomes of post-transplant infections including among older adults, novel diagnostics in the care of immunocompromised host, and fungal infections. The program has strong record of multi-disciplinary clinical and translational collaboration within the ID section and across departments of the Yale School of Medicine. The group also champions longitudinal quality improvement initiatives in collaboration with the Yale Transplantation Center.The program has actively participated in multi-center clinical trial sites pertaining to novel anti-virals and diagnostic tests in immunocompromised hosts. Yale is a participant in the NIH-sponsored, multicenter HIV to HIV kidney and liver transplantation (HOPE-in- Action) program.

A dedicated Transplant & Immunocompromised Infectious Diseases Academic Clinician Track is available through the Yale ID Fellowship and is overseen by Drs. Maricar Malinis, Marwan Azar and Paul Trubin. In their second year of fellowship, interested clinician-educator scholar track fellows receive immunocompromised ID training in accordance with the American Society of Transplantation Infectious Diseases Society Transplant Infectious Diseases Curriculum. Educational activities include journal clubs and a dedicated bi-weekly transplant infectious diseases conference. Fellows are also given the opportunity to lead and participate in research and quality improvement projects. They continue to gain critical clinical exposure through additional focused rotations on the immunocompromised inpatient ID services and outpatient Transplant Infectious Disease. Fellows are provided with hands-on intensive mentorship and career guidance from core faculty, most of whom are clinician educators with a strong record in medical education, mentorship and/or clinical research. Graduates of this track have successfully transitioned into roles as academic faculty in transplant infectious diseases.

The Joint Adult & Pediatric Transplant Infectious Diseases Conference is a biweekly didactic lecture series on fundamentally important concepts in Transplant & Immunocompromised Infectious Diseases. The Conference series is a forum for Yale and extramurally based experts to provide teaching primarily calibrated for the development of interested fellows and residents, but also transplant-focused faculty from Infectious Diseases and other Medicine and Surgery subspecialties.