15th June, 2005We had our fifth Steering Meeting, held in King's College London. It was a great oportunity to discuss all the technical issues we face as a team and to discuss the preliminary data from the first patient samples.
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May, 2005 We are now well underway with the shipping and collection of participant blood and urine samples. A technical meeting will be held on the 15th June at King's College London where, we will discuss in depth, the technical issues of fine tuning the assays and procedures used in each individual lab across Europe.
To date we have recruited and bled the following amount of patients:
Group one: Stable Calcinuerin inhibitor patients:
Group Two: Stable NON-Calcinuerin Inhibitor patients:
Group Three: Chronic Rejector Patients:
Group Four: Tolerant patients:
Januray 2005 - 2005 has so far been a busy time for the coordinating centre.
Firstly, the Imperial College coordinating site move to King's College London predominated the start of the research year. Imperial College will remain the main research ethics committee for the study, as the study was originally approved there.
All ammendments and approval will continue to be administered through this site.
Now that we are settled in we are happy to announce that we have recruited other UK sites which have identified tolerant patients for the study. These local investigators are listed in the physician's club along with the number of patients recruited at their individual sites. This also includes the oversees identifiers.
The Steering Committee Meeting for 2005 will take place on the 25th March in Brussels where we will discuss the first set of results created from our first few patients.
April 2004 - To date we have identified a potential 45 tolerant
patients, who are the most difficult and rare group to identify.
We are currently seeking ethical consent from these patients.
Thanks to our many participants and consortium we have identified
patients right across Europe including the UK, France, Portugal,
Italy, Sweden, Spain and Belgium.
Once all consent has been obtained, we plan to distribute the
blood samples across Europe to our clinical partners to commence
the research.
We are hoping that further patients will be identified through
awareness of this web site and also through our continuing recruitment
drive.
Our third Steering Committee meeting will be held in Paris on
the 7th May, to bring the project forward to the next stage of
sample collection.
January 2004 - At present we are at phase one in the
project. We have secured ethical approval and institutional approval.
The next step is to identify those patients, which fit our desired
protocol. This will involve recruitment of patients from all over
Europe. Our partners in the consortium are currently trying to
identify these people through local GPs and institutes. After
the patients have been identified we will move onto phase two
which involves the blood sample collection and distribution.
We recently held our second steering Committee meeting in Brussels
during which we set our goals for the next six months. This involves
the identification of tolerant patients throughout Europe. Control
patients will also be recruited through the same channels as the
tolerant patients, which will be traced by using databases of
membership of transplant professional organisations. Informal
contacts will be supplemented by direct approaches to transplant
physicians and surgeons throughout the EU in an attempt to identify
potentially appropriate patients.
Application will be made to obtain ethical and institutional approval
to take blood and to utilize biopsy material surplus to clinical
requirement from patients and controls.
We have so far identified 45 "tolerant" patients in a number of different locations across Europe:
Indices of Tolerance 2004 |
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