Leeds Hospitals Charity has funded revolutionary new equipment to help more accurately match organs to patients waiting for a transplant at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.

Thanks to your donations, we’ve provided more than £86,000 to fund a Next Generation Sequencer (NGS) for the Pathology team.

The NGS platform will enable the team to conduct high-resolution Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) typing, used to match patients and donors for bone marrow and solid organ transplants.

This new technology means that scientists in the Pathology lab can match the tissue type of donated organs more accurately to the transplant patients, ultimately giving them the chance to have the best quality of life post-transplant.

Neil Marsden, Principal Clinical Scientist has worked on the Transplant Immunology Department at Leeds Teaching Hospitals for over 25 years, he said:

 “This new technology allows us to test DNA to find the best match for our patients at the start of their transplant journey. The same equipment has been used during the pandemic to identify different variants of covid and seeing how effective it was inspired us to look at the NGS. I’m very grateful to have received this funding from Leeds Hospitals Charity, as we’re now able to examine lots more tissue samples and find any suitable matches quicker for our patients.”

The team plan to use the NGS initially for patients waiting for a bone marrow transplant, but later it will be used for solid organ transplants, like livers, kidneys and even hands.

Previously the sequencing pipeline used by the team meant they could only test around 80 samples per month, but it is hoped the new system will double this, with the potential for specialist testing in the future meaning thousands of samples could be tested.