For many patients who sadly have
failure of their organs,
transplantation is really,
not only the best treatment available,
but sadly is the only life-saving treatment that's available.
Unfortunately we simply do not have enough organs available for transplantation.
One of the specific goals of this project
is to develop novel therapy
that will be really useful
for our organ recipient patients in the future.
The idea here is
to be able to maximise the number of organs that are suitable for transplantation
and therefore to ensure that most patients are able to
receive that life-saving therapy.
Development of new drugs
or making discoveries about
disease processes,
normally is a very difficult
and lengthy process.
It is important to use models
including animal models that accurately
capture what happens in the human body.
So the large animal models that we're using,
that would be the pig model,
are particularly important
because the pigs
match humans in terms of their size,
their physiology, their anatomy,
and therefore they're really important for bridging that gap
between doing things on the bench side and in mice
and between trying to get a new therapy into humans.
We have a lot of data
and years of evidence
that actually the data that we can learn from animals
can be essential
for accelerating
the process of making new discoveries.
In designing our experiments,
we use the 3Rs principle (replacement, reduction, and refinement of animals used in research)
as far as we can.
So for example,
in today's experiments with the pig,
is being designed specifically to answer multiple different questions
in both the kidneys,
in the heart,
and also in the small intestine
and by doing this what we can try
and then achieve is to use as few animals as possible.
At all times we try and...
replace animal use with other models.
For example,
we use organ perfusion technology
where we are perfusing human organs with human blood
and then we are using that to
test the safety and the effectiveness
of drugs on these humanoids.
The idea that organs may be able to be
perfused with blood outside of the body
is not particularly new.
The first serious attempt of doing this was
almost a century ago and this was done by Alexis Corral and Charles Lindbergh
and they showed that various organs
could be kept alive outside of the body
for various times.
Now, we have more
advanced technologies that allow us to reperfuse
human organs with blood
to first of all understand
how organs function,
which organs are suitable for transplantation,
but also how we can perhaps
improve the quality of the organs
or reduce the damage
that these organs suffer during transplantation.
For the first time in the world,
we were able to put human cells
to regenerate or recondition human livers
that previously would have been deemed untransplantable.
So going forward,
we hope that our dependency
on animal experiments will reduce
but I think where we are
would have been very difficult if not impossible to get to
without animal experimentation.
So I'm particularly excited to be a part of this project.
I think it's really important now that we're on the cusp of understanding
the real nuances of organ transplantation
and it's really exciting to be doing that in Cambridge
where we have all of these excellent clinical centres,
as well as the University Departments,
this is the kind of project that can't really be recapitulated elsewhere.
The sad matter is that actually there are patients dying every day today
because we don't have an effective treatment.
This research has the potential to save lives
and it's not just my research
but it's the research of people in my position,
so this is why this is important to the society
because the people that we are treating is of course
our mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters.