Fred P. Sanfilippo

Fred (Alfred P.) Sanfilippo (born August 30, 1949) is an American physician-scientist, immuno-pathologist and academic leader. He is the Director of the Emory-Georgia Tech Healthcare Innovation Program,  professor of pathology and laboratory medicine in the Emory School of Medicine,  and professor of health policy and management in the Rollins School of Public Health.

Education

Sanfilippo was born in Racine Wisconsin and grew up in Queens, NY where he graduated from Archbishop Molloy High School in 1966. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1970 majoring in physics, he received an NIH fellowship to the MD-PhD Medical Scientist Training Program at Duke University, during which time he completed his M.Sc. in physics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1972, his Ph.D. in immunology at Duke in 1975, and his M.D. in 1976. He remained at Duke for his internship, residency, and fellowship training from 1976-1979, receiving specialty board certification in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology, and Immunopathology.

Career

Duke University

Sanfilippo joined the faculty at Duke in 1979 as Director of the Transplantation Immunogenetics Laboratory, rising to the rank of professor of pathology, experimental surgery, and immunology in 1989-90. While at Duke he held appointments as director of the immunopathology laboratory, chair of the Committee on Health Affairs, and was elected faculty representative to the Basic Science Steering Committee and Academic Council. Since 2015 he has served on the Duke Health-School of Medicine Board of Visitors.

Johns Hopkins Medicine

From 1993-2000 Sanfilippo served at Johns Hopkins University as Baxley Professor and chair of the department of pathology, and at Johns Hopkins Hospital as Pathologist-in-Chief. On arriving he combined three independent departments of pathology and laboratory medicine into a single department, demonstrating significant growth and improved performance and organizational culture. He led the formation of the Johns Hopkins Medical Labs as well as the Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Transplant Center, serving as its first director of research. He also chaired numerous committees including Telemedicine, International Affairs, and Professorial Promotions.

Ohio State University

In 2000 Sanfilippo joined Ohio State University as chief executive officer of the OSU Medical Center, dean of the College of Medicine and Public Health, and senior vice-president for Health Sciences. He developed the Center for Personal Health Care as founding director, the Center for Integrative Health, and the department of Biomedical Informatics, all of which were among the first in the country. He also was Board Chair of Managed Health Care Systems, Inc., which administered the OSU health plans and developed Your Plan for Health as a self-insured personalized health plan for all OSU faculty, staff and families.  He led the creation of OSU Physicians as the integrated faculty practice plan, and coordination of operations and budgets of the College of Medicine, OSU Health System and OSU Physicians, resulting in significant improvements in performance and organizational culture.

Emory University

In 2007 Sanfilippo became the chief executive officer of the Robert W. Woodruff Health Sciences Center at Emory University, executive vice president for Health Affairs, and board chair of Emory Healthcare.  He led the creation of centers for Critical Care, Palliative Care, Pediatrics, and Informatics, created vice president positions in research and global health, instituted a Health Sciences strategic and facility plan, and co-led implementation of the Emory University strategic plan. In 2010 he became founding director of the Emory-Georgia Tech Healthcare Innovation Program, which provides quarterly Healthcare Innovation Symposia, semi-annual competitive faculty and student seed grants focused on healthcare delivery sciences, and annual student-professional networking events.

Consulting and board positions

Sanfilippo has served as a consultant and board member to numerous academic, government, corporate, and non-profit institutions, and as president of several professional organizations including the American Society for Investigative Pathology, Universities Associated for Research and Education in Pathology, and the American Society of Transplantation. He was the founding chair of the Association of Pathology Chairs Senior Fellows Group, a novel consortium of former chairs that has provided significant value to the professional society and its members. As a board member of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) and chair of the Data Acquisition and Computer Utilization Committee, he led the creation of the national Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients (SRTR), which is funded by the U.S. Health Resources Services Administration and has tracked information on all US transplant donors and recipients since 1987. From 2012-2021 he served The Marcus Foundation as a Trustee and Medical Director, helping to develop projects that have had clinical impact in areas including cancer and integrative health . Since 2015, Sanfilippo has been a founding director of the Alliance for Cell Therapy Now, which has brought together the major research, clinical, and patient advocacy leaders in regenerative medicine to help advise government agencies, congress, and the public on the research and clinical aspects of regenerative medicine and cell therapy.

Notable achievements and awards

Sanfilippo is recognized for his research in transplantation immunogenetics, diagnostic immuno- pathology, and health services, with over 300 scientific publications, three patents, and more than $30 million in grants as principal or co-principal investigator from the National Institutes of Health and other organizations. As an educator, he has been principal investigator-sponsor of over $10 million in research training grants, supervised numerous fellows and graduate students, and been on the editorial board of more than a dozen scientific journals.

His clinical studies were the first to use multivariate analyses to demonstrate the relative importance of HLA matching in unrelated donor renal transplantation and the first to use a randomized trial to demonstrate the benefit of HLA matching in high risk cornea transplantation. His use of immunohistochemical labelling provided the first comprehensive characterization of alloantigen expression on the human cornea. He was among the first to correlate the phenotype and patterns of inflammatory cell infiltrates in kidney and cardiac allografts, and his contributions to renal transplant pathology were incorporated into the Banff Classification developed in 1991, which rapidly became the international standard still used today. In health services research, his use of multivariate analysis with the SRTR data base was the first to quantify the national disparity in waiting times for black renal transplant candidates. Using objective metrics, he also was the first to demonstrate that organizational culture could be significantly improved in academic health centers and was associated with increased clinical and academic performance.

Sanfilippo has given more than 200 invited and proffered scientific presentations, organized and moderated more than 100 conferences, and been elected as an officer to more than 20 professional organizations, as well as to the Alpha Omega Alpha National Medical Honor Society and as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been recognized at one of the top 10 leaders in Columbus Ohio by Columbus Monthly, Business Leader of the Year by Columbus Business First, and one of the 100 most influential Atlantans by the Atlanta Business Chronicle.  His awards include the Norman Cohn Hope Award from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, the John Peter Minton Hero of Hope Research Champion Medal of Honor from the American Cancer Society, the Thomas Jefferson Award and Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Duke School of Medicine, the Johns Hopkins University Distinguished Medical Alumnus Award. and the Association of Pathology Chairs Distinguished Service Award.

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