Malcolm MacConmara, M.D.
Assistant Professor

Malcolm MacConmara, M.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Surgical Transplantation in the Department of Surgery at UT Southwestern Medical Center. He focuses on transplants of the kidney, liver, and pancreas both in children and adults. Dr. MacConmara is also trained in immunology and concentrates his research on strategies to prevent organ rejection.

After earning his medical degree at the University of Dublin, Trinity College, Dr. MacConmara completed an internship at Adelaide and Meath Hospitals in Dublin. He then completed his residency in general surgery, including a year of training in kidney/liver transplant and hepatobiliary surgery, at Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the U.K. He performed a research fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School, followed by a second residency in general surgery at Washington University. He then received advanced training in abdominal organ transplantation through a fellowship at Emory University.

Dr. MacConmara's research background is in immunology and clinical transplantation research. He has worked in the area of severe traumatic injury, specifically adaptive immune responses, including Treg and Breg, initiated post-injury that control inflammation and promote immunosuppressed phenotypes. Within the context of the NIGMS Inflammation and the Host Response to Injury GlueGrant, Dr. MacConmara worked on profiling gene expression in response to traumatic injury in order to define novel injury-induced pathways and targets for potential therapeutic intervention. He  has also worked with large clinical datasets in recent transplant publications.

Dr. MacConmara's basic and translational focus remains on identification of novel targets to prevent damaging inflammatory responses within the context of organ donor research. Through donor liver genotyping the aim of these studies are the discovery of protective genetic polymorphisms leading to favorable phenotypes of less hepatocytes injury/death. Under the mentorship of Dr. Helen Hobbs, Dr. MacConmara is developing a DNA biorepository that will permit examination of a novel HSD17B13 variant on donor liver responses to acute injury and long-term fatty liver formation in the allograft.

He is a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (M.R.C.S.Ed.), the American College of Surgeons, the Association for Academic Surgery, the American Society of Transplantation, and the American Society of Transplant Surgeons.