Kathryn Tinckam

Biography

Dr. Tinckam’s work is at the unique intersection of her dual specialty certifications in clinical medicine (transplant nephrology) and laboratory medicine (histocompatibility and immunogenetics - HLA). Her goal is to enhance equitable access to life-saving transplantation through clinician education in histocompatibility, and the design of optimized and standardized tools, algorithms, and protocols to better match organs to recipients, supporting improved long-term outcomes. Dr. Tinckam has developed and implemented new strategies to identify and treat HLA antibodies (a major cause of severe transplant rejection) in lung transplant population, resulting in improved patient survival. She also led the development and implementation of similar algorithms/crossmatching approaches for the Canadian Blood Services Canadian Transplant Registry and kidney transplant recipients. Her kidney transplant algorithm is now used by all national transplant registries. In her role as Vice-Chair of the Canadian Blood Services (CBS) National HLA Advisory Committee, she developed a web-based calculator to estimate the likelihood of donor matching for a recipient. She is Physician-In-Chief of the University Health Network.