There have been several significant achievements over the last 18 months within this sub-theme. Research has continued to inform the use of kidneys donated for organ transplantation after cardiac death, providing information on the influence of donor malignancy, kidney disease and timing of cardiac death on outcome that has aided planning and resourcing of organ recovery after cardiac death and helped maximise donor numbers. In addition, studies have clarified the optimum methods of storing organs after retrieval. Andrew Bradley (PI) and Chris Watson (CI) were recently awarded a programme grant from the NIHR to improve access to and outcomes after kidney transplantation.

Also under this subtheme, significant progress has been made in the development of a prototype probe for evaluating the fat content of livers prior to transplantation. Fatty donor livers perform poorly following organ transplantation and the novel probe (developed in conjunction with the photonics and sensors group within the Department of Engineering) promises to provide for the first time an objective way to estimate the fat content of a donor liver prior to transplantation. The most recent prototype has been shown to be effective in pre-clinical studies and is now undergoing full clinical evaluation. We continue to evaluate a variety of novel immunosuppressive strategies in clinical transplantation and in conjunction with Ken Smith and colleagues we have recently highlighted an important limitation to the use of B cell depletion as an induction strategy at the time of kidney transplantation.

Sub-theme leads: Chris Watson and Andrew Bradley