Balamurugan Appakalai

Balamurugan Appakalai
Associate Professor, Department of Surgery
University of Louisville, USA

Biography

I am Balamurugan, working as an Associate Professor at the Diabetes Institute of University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. I direct the Clinical Islet cGMP facility and Islet Core and we isolate human and animal islets for basic islet biology and clinical islet cell transplantation. I am an “Islet Biologist” conducting research towards the treatment of diabetes especially pancreatic islet cell isolation, study of functional behavior of islets and transplantation since 1993. I am directing the Islet Processing Core which processes about 200 islet isolations including human (deceased donor pancreases and pancreases from patients undergoing total or completion pancreatectomy followed by islet auto-transplantation), porcine (adult and young pig donor pancreases), and non-human primate pancreases each year for the University of Minnesota Islet Transplant Program.