QUOD
Quality in organ donation.
Chief investigator: Professor Rutger Ploeg
Location/Institution: University of Oxford
Funder: NHSBT Research and Development Committee
NHSBT research area: Organs and tissues
Summary
Organ donation and transplant saves thousands of lives a year and is one of the greatest successes in modern medicine. However, over the past decade, there has been an increasing need for organs throughout the UK, far surpassing the supply. As many as one in three patients on the transplant waiting list will die or become too unwell to receive a transplant as a result of this disparity.
The key aim of the transplant community and NHSBT is to increase the number and quality of organs by optimising donor management, conditioning higher risk organs and repairing discarded organs previously deemed not transplantable.
In support of this objective, the Quality in Organ Donation (QUOD) Consortium, integrating close collaboration between academic transplant centres, clinical services in donation, retrieval and transplantation and NHSBT, was developed. The QUOD programme has developed a national BioResource in organ donation linking clinical data in donors and recipients with analyses of multiple sequential samples collected from consented donors and organs throughout the UK. The overall aim is to identify pathways and biomarkers of injury/repair, predicting outcomes and allowing targeted intervention to prevent and reduce injury or repair organs.
