The Quality in Organ Donation (QUOD) initiative is a nationwide programme which aims to identify pathways of injury and repair in donor organs for transplantation.
Despite the advances made in recent years in the realms of organ donation and transplantation, a significant and widening disparity exists between organ supply and demand. This disparity is predicted to worsen over the course of the next decade making this the biggest challenge facing the transplant community today.
To address this problem the transplant community have been turning to organs previously considered to be unsuitable for transplantation, including organs from extended criteria donors and donors after circulatory arrest. In order to do this, QUOD aims to reduce uncertainty over which organ is viable or not and wants to facilitate research by collecting blood, urine and tissue samples of appropriately consented / authorised organ donors. Through this, we hope to determine pathways of injury and repair in organs and identify biomarkers which can be used to better predict the outcomes of transplantation.
