Prof Rutger Ploeg opened the 8th QUOD National Symposium on Thursday 27 March 2025 in Birmingham with a warm welcome, announcing that this would be his last as Principal Investigator before the handover of leadership in May to the QUOD Executives. The theme of the meeting was “QUOD’s vision for next 5 years” and he invited the audience to get involved with the discussions about where QUOD should go next in terms of expansion and new endeavours, such as partnerships with charities and industry, hearing and supporting patients, and how to improve QUOD’s visibility and increase sample use. Rutger thanked everyone in the extended QUOD team, including the NORS and regional laboratories teams and the core team in Oxford, for all their hard work before handing over to Chris Callaghan, Associate Medical Director of Organ Utilisation for NHSBT. Mr Callaghan opened the proceedings by congratulating the QUOD team on their “deeply impressive” success. He began by sharing the good news that NHSBT has agreed to fund QUOD for the next 5 years and shared an overview of how the transplantation arm of NHSBT can learn from their colleagues in blood donation, which accounts for the largest proportion of donations. He highlighted the need for diversification of the donor base and collaboration in order to join the dots and grow QUOD. James Hunter, QUOD Clinical Coordinator, followed on, presenting the “Vision to 2030”, with two main goals – increasing sample utilisation and ensuring financial stability – and outlining plans for four key innovations: a perfusate biobank, a recipient bioresource, a data library resource, and an enhanced whole-organ platform. Their enthusiasm and passion for what the next 5 years hold was compelling as the Symposium got underway.
Conversation
It all begins with a conversation. Organ donation would not happen without the sensitive work of the Specialist Nurses in Organ Donation (SNODs), who solicitously approach prospective donor families at an incredibly difficult time to talk about donation, not just for transplantation but also for research. Michael Gorton, SNOD Research Lead for the Midlands, spoke of what organ donation and fulfilling a loved one’s wishes to donate means to donor families, powerfully illustrating this with a personal account from a donor family. He also reported the statistics on organ donation, which show that around 6–9% of families who consent for donation for transplantation do not consent to the use of organs for research. It became evident during his talk that improving knowledge on research to the SNODS so that they can convey this information to the donor families is key to improving consent rates, and also that increasing the diversity of donors would be hugely beneficial to support studies into wider ethnicities, with the true gain being a better understanding of organs and improved outcomes for patients.
Collaborations and commonalities
It was clear throughout the day that a successful future will rely on and hugely benefit from collaborations. While this was emphasized across all of the sessions, it also became clear that there were many commonalities among the different groups across the transplantation community, who were brought together at the Symposium.
The industry panel discussion session showcased some of the strong links between QUOD and industry, with representatives from AstraZeneca, Argenx, and CardiaTec. The session highlighted the real need to identify emerging research needs and how industry and QUOD can help and support each other to work synergistically. The need for biobanks such as QUOD to increase their visibility to industry was noted and having a shared vision and identifying shared commonalities is of particular importance moving forward to increase science knowledge and improve patient outcomes.
QUOD is aware of the need to be prudent in ensuring the right research is being supported. Maria Kaisar, QUOD Scientific Coordinator, chaired the panel discussion on “Scientific Innovation Across Organs”. Sarah Richardson (Exeter) presented her work using whole pancreas organs to map islets in these organs from healthy donors as well as those with diabetes to understand the pathology of diabetes. Katie Mylonas (Edinburgh) described how she used QUOD samples to look at senescent cells in kidney disease and identify candidate markers of successful transplantation. Luke Williams (Cambridge) is studying biopsies from healthy hearts to look at primary graft dysfunction with a view to identifying potential therapeutic targets and Barney Stephenson (Newcastle) spoke about his research on liver transplantation, including ex-vivo normothermic liver perfusion and his involvement with the Organ Quality Assessment (OrQA) project. All four researchers demonstrated how the QUOD bioresource has supported crucial research across these different organs.
Luke Yates, Trustee for the charity Live Life Give Life, chaired the session highlighting the role of QUOD in supporting early career researchers and began by promoting the QUOD Innovation Competition, which is offering researchers the chance to win up to £5,000 of QUOD samples. Three early career researchers presented their studies involving QUOD samples, emphasising QUOD’s impact on education and career development.
In the session on the use of big data and AI, Lynn Morrice from Health Data Research UK outlined how they help researchers to access diverse and high-quality data. Following this, Colin Wilson, Principal Investigator of OrQA, talked about how big data is being used for AI in the OrQA project, which is supported by QUOD and uses images of livers and AI to score and predict outcomes of liver transplantation. OrQA aims to overcome human issues and reduce and avoid the rejection of organs, particularly livers, which may have otherwise gone on to be successfully transplanted.
While it was very much agreed that QUOD has supported a broad range of research projects in many different ways and that it is important to reflect on this, it was emphasised that the bioresource must not become a “stamp collection” and that there is so much scope for QUOD to grow. Prof Sir Rory Collins’ overview of the hugely successful (and huge in terms of its size and depth) UK Biobank really showcased the importance of duration and accessibility to be able to support more and more projects, while providing valuable insights that QUOD can learn from.
Celebrations and conclusions
The Symposium ended with celebrations of the success of QUOD to date and a reflection on the day, as the speakers and contributors were thanked. A special thanks and acknowledgement went out to Xiaohong Huang, regional laboratory lead at King’s College London, for over 10 years of service to the QUOD programme. She has worked tirelessly and diligently over the years and will be greatly missed by the QUOD team and we wish her a wonderful and happy retirement.
And finally, while this may have been Prof Ploeg’s last QUOD Symposium before he retires, it is evident that the future of QUOD is bright. Discussions flowed throughout the day, over coffee and lunch breaks, with new networks being created and connections forged. The QUOD team has clearly defined goals set for the next 5 years and a strong community of driven and ambitious members all working together, with a unified desire for success. What began as a vision more than 13 years ago has become Prof Ploeg’s legacy and is growing from strength to strength to support and advance organ research, ultimately improving patient outcomes.
