Rutger J Ploeg MD PhD FRCS FEBS (Hon)
Professor of Transplant Surgery and Director of Clinical and Translational Research
Nuffield Department of Surgery, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Biography
Professor of Transplant Biology |Director Clinical & Translational Research|Consultant Transplant Surgeon.
Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, University of Oxford, United Kingdom;
Professor of Transplantation Surgery and Research, University of Leiden, The Netherlands (part-time);
Emeritus Professor of Transplant Surgery, University of Groningen, The Netherlands;
Principal Coordinating Investigator of the Consortium for Organ Preservation in Europe (COPE)
Director of UK Quality in Organ Donation (QUOD) National Biobank and Scientific Platform.
Rutger J. Ploeg was trained as a surgeon at the University of Leiden. During his fellowship in 1986 at the University of Wisconsin with Dr. F.O. Belzer he was involved in the development and clinical introduction of the UW Solution. After his clinical ASTS Fellowship at Madison, WI, USA, he was appointed Consultant Surgeon in 1994 at the University Medical Centre Groningen (UMCG) in the Netherlands and Professor of Surgery in 2001. He served the European Society for Organ Transplantation as General Secretary and President of ESOT. In Groningen received a Duth NIH grant to expanded organ perfusion and developed new clinical oxygenated hypo- and normothermic perfusion devices for kidney and liver (Organ Assist, later XVIVO). In June 2011 he accepted a Chair at the University of Oxford in Transplantation Biology and post as Consultant Surgeon. In 2018 he was appointed Professor of Transplant Surgery and Research (part-time) at Leiden University to enhance transplant research activities whilst continuing his work at the University of Oxford.
In the past decades Rutger Ploeg has intensively focused how to improve quality and transplantability of donor organs characterising mechanisms of injury and repair during brain death, organ retrieval and perfusion. He built the Consortium for Organ Preservation in Europe (COPE) to study organ perfusion, that delivered European milestone multicentre trials on machine perfusion (NEJM, Lancet, Natrue, JAMA). He also developed with NHSBT the UK national donor and transplant biobank (QUOD) to facilitate research. Rutger Ploeg has published more than 450 articles in peer-reviewed journals (H-index = 67) and his current grant portfolio totals 10M GBP.
