Dr. Orlando is an Associate Professor of Surgery at the Wake Forest School of Medicine, in Winston Salem, North Carolina. He is also an attending kidney and pancreas surgeon at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and a scientist specializing the bioengineering, regeneration and repair of the kidney and endocrine pancreas at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM).
Dr. Orlando received his MD, degree in general surgery and PhD from Tor Vergata University of Rome, Italy, in 1996, 2002 and 2006, respectively. He specialized in kidney and liver transplantation in Rome, Paris, France (Liver Unit, Paul Brousse Hospital) and Brussels, Belgium (General Surgery and Liver Unit, Catholic University of Leuven). In 2008, he was awarded the Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship by the European Commission and he thereafter relocated to Winston Salem (WFIRM) and Oxford, UK (Transplant Research Immunology Group), to specialize in transplant immunology and regenerative medicine (2008-2011). He has been at the Wake Forest School of Medicine since 2011.
He currently serves as past chair of the Regenerative Medicine Community of Practice of the American Society of Transplantation, counselor of the International Pancreas and Islet Transplant Association and of the Cell Transplantation (IPITA) and Regenerative Medicine Society (CTRMS), as well as chair of the Education Committee of IPITA. He has also served as co-chair of the Gastrointestinal Committee of the International Society for Cell and Gene Therapy, of which is currently counselor. He is the chair of the TERMIS-AST Co-Sponsored webinar series on transplant and regenerative medicine, and of the CTRMS webinar series. He serves in quality of associate editor on the board of numerous transplant and regenerative medicine journals, among which Transplantation.
As of January 19, 2023, he has published about 300 papers (primary manuscripts, reviews, books and book chapters) and his H-index is 52. He is an internationally-known and respected kidney and pancreatic transplant surgeon and innovator in the areas of regenerative medicine, tissue and organ engineering, production and characterization of bio-scaffolds, and overall the application of regenerative medicine technologies to transplant medicine. For his work aiming at bringing together transplant and regenerative medicine, he is the recipient of the 2017 Rising Star in Transplantation Award bestowed by the American Society of Transplant Surgeons and of the 2020 Basic Science Investigator Award bestowed by the American Society of Transplantation. He is also the editor in chief of a new book series on transplant and regenerative medicine, published by Elsevier-Academic Press.
In collaboration with John Robertson (Rametrix Technologies Inc.) over more than a decade, Dr. Orlando has studied methods to repair and regenerate ischemically damaged kidneys, identified pathways and biomarker of regeneration and repair in the renal allograft, and performed cutting-edge studies of artificial mitochondrial transplantation. Most recently, Drs. Orlando, Robertson, and Senger have applied Rametrix® Molecular Urinalysis to donation after cardiac death kidneys in order to determine whether this technology may offer more thorough diagnostic and/or prognostic information when compared to the currently adopted method to monitor the graft function.