King's College London steven.sacks @kcl.ac.uk
GMEC Transplantation Programme (completed)
Members
Professor Andrew Bradley Cambridge University
Professor Ken Smith Cambridge University
Professor Kathryn Wood Oxford University
Professor Peter Friend Oxford University
Professor Anthony Warrens Imperial College London
Professor Marlene Rose Imperial College London
Professor Maggie Dallman Imperial College London
Dr Anthony Dorling King’s College London
Professor Robert Lechler King’s College London
Dr Steve Powis University College London
Professor Neil Sheerin Newcastle University
There is an urgent need to improve the longevity of solid organ transplants, which has not increased significantly over the past two decades despite advances with short-term graft survival results. The overall aim of the programme was to pool resources across the GMEC partners and major UK transplant centres, including the MRC Centre for Transplantation, to improve outcome prediction and patient management. This would reduce treatment complications and provide earlier intervention for patients at greater risk of graft loss.
The Transplantation Cluster has a number of aims; to evaluation candidate biomarkers and novel therapeutics; to test the predictive value of markers in the inflammatory and immune cascade leading to long term acceptance or rejection of human organ transplants and to improve long-term outcomes through investigator-led trial of novel biotherapeutics.
A GMEC-sponsored meeting (Genetics in Transplantation Workshop, The Royal Society, November 2009) brought together major UK and Irish Transplant Centres to set a biomarker research programme in motion and to identify the genomic factors affecting transplant longevity. The programme subsequently received MRC funding for the first major clinical trial aimed at boosting the function of transplanted kidneys using a coating of anti-inflammatory proteins.