Transplant

Barbara Breckenridge and Dr. Liise Kayler are on a mission to end inequities African Americans face to getting a kidney transplant. Barbara received a kidney transplant 23 years ago. Kayler is a transplant surgeon and leads the transplant program at Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo, NY. 

In 2020 they received a grant to assemble a local community advisory board and strategize solutions. The board then formed a non-profit called Kidney Health Together. Read here for more about our partnership. The group includes kidney transplant recipients, people seeking transplants, donors, and care partners.

They are developing educational products, like readable print materials and short educational videos. They run a Facebook support group a for kidney patients and their supporters look and look at ways to improve organizational health literacy at the transplant center. In 2024 they refined the center’s patient form letters with plain language concepts. 

Breckenridge and Kayler's research projects involve kidney community-based participatory research (CBPR) to conceptualize and implement kidney transplant access and outcome programs and resources with/for individuals with kidney failure. Some of our papers are listed below.

The Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities recognizes the work of those who engage actively in scholarly and creative pursuits beyond their teaching responsibilities. 

Advocate for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion        

Kayler is praised as an “ardent advocate for several initiatives to increase access to transplantation for all patients, but particularly those who are underserved or are from vulnerable populations.”

Internationally renowned for her expertise in renal transplantation, Kayler focuses her scholarly pursuits on determining the factors that make a kidney ideal for successful transplant procedures.

Her goal, award nominators say, is to create a larger pool of available transplantable kidneys.

Since joining UB, Kayler has been the PI, site PI or co-PI on 16 grants totaling more than $8 million from the National Institutes of Health, the Health Resources and Services Administration and the New York State Department of Health, among others.

In 2021, she was named the co-PI on a $2.6 million NIH R01 grant to increase live donor kidney transplantation through video-based education and mobile communication.

Kayler also is the site PI for two other trials: a $2.5 million grant to test the utility of cell-free DNA testing compared to standard creatinine testing, and a $383,000 grant to evaluate whether introducing cell-free DNA testing into clinical practice reduces the number of renal biopsies performed when compared with usual care.

An advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion in health care and combating structural racism, Kayler co-founded and is president of the New York Center for Kidney Transplantation, a statewide collaborative to improve access to kidney transplantation, and serves on the board of directors of the Kidney Foundation of WNY.

In her clinical practice, she established an academic-community partnership with underrepresented patients that established themselves into the nonprofit organization Kidney Health Together to improve the lives of all kidney failure patients.