KEPsoft Collaborative
Products and Services
Introduction
KEPsoft Collaborative provides software and services to support the optimisation of national and international Kidney Exchange Programmes (KEPs).
By doing so, KEPsoft Collaborative aims to widen access to living donor kidney transplants for patients suffering from end stage renal disease.
KEPsoft Collaborative is a result of eight years of interdisciplinary and international collaboration, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) and national funding bodies.
Building on this interdisciplinary collaboration, KEPsoft has been developed jointly with INESC TEC, HUN-REN-KRTK and Óbuda University and the University of Glasgow.
What is KEPsoft Collaborative?
KEPsoft Collaborative is a not-for-profit social enterprise, enabling the development of (inter)national KEPs for countries that do not have or not able to support a KEP, and supporting the optimisation of existing KEPs.
KEPsoft Collaborative offers a variety of services to support KEPs:
Software products that optimise the allocation of kidney donors and recipients and are installed and maintained locally within the customer’s IT environment or within the cloud.
Operational support services such as software installation, upgrades, and operational user support.
Specialised consultancy services, providing organisational support to National Transplant Organisations (NTOs) seeking to set up regional, national or international KEPs.
Organisational Aims
Social Capital
Not-for-profit organisation.
Trusted partner in the European transplantation community.
Expertise
Multidisciplinary European network, forming a critical mass of experts (such as policy makers, software developers and nephrologists) that is hard to achieve and maintain at the national level.
A leading position regarding knowledge of best practices in optimisation and histocompatibility.
KEPsoft Collaborative is built on trust and a sense of partnership.
KEPsoft Collaborative’s expertise facilitates best-in-class consulting services.
The Team
Vijay Luthra
CEO
Vijay is a strategic adviser in global health. Previously, Vijay worked with the NHS as a consultant and adviser. More recently Vijay led the set-up of Prenetics retail covid testing business and Thriva Health’s government business. Vijay is a renal transplantee and an advocate for neurodiverse talent as he has ADHD. He is an adviser to Kidney Research UK, an Associate NED in the NHS and an adviser to the GOSH Charity. Vijay is due to become CEO of KEPsoft Collaborative.
Dr William Pettersson
CTO
Will is a mathematician, algorithmicist and software engineer, currently employed as a research software engineer at the University of Glasgow. He is currently working on the KidneyAlgo EPSRC project with Professor David Manlove. Will is set to become KEPsoft Collaborative CIC CTO. Will has practical experience with coding at all levels, from assembly for the HC12 through C, and C++ all the way to Python, PHP and Perl.
Professor David Manlove
Scientific Adviser
David is Professor of Algorithms and Complexity at the University of Glasgow. Since 2007 he has worked with NHS Blood and Transplant, leading the development of algorithms for the UK Living Kidney Sharing Scheme, which have led to over 1,900 transplants to date. He was chair of the ENCKEP and KEP-SOFT projects funded by COST. In 2019 he received the Lord Kelvin Medal from the Royal Society of Edinburgh for “pioneering work in matching algorithms and software [that] has enabled a significant increase in living kidney transplants, thereby improving public health”.
Mel Anderson
Non-Executive Director
Mel is responsible for managing the central IP & Commercialisation function at the University of Glasgow. The IP & Commercialisation team is responsible for identifying and evaluating intellectual property (IP) generated via university research and leading the exploitation of selected IP via licensing or spin-out formation. Mel will be GU Holdings Ltd’s representative on the KEPsoft Collaborative CIC Board.
Sheena MacCormick
Adviser
Sheena is IP & Innovation Manager at the University of Glasgow. She has been working closely with the team to support the spinout process and has led on the associated legal compliance processes in advance of the spinout.
Sheena has worked in innovation for 10 years, including a post with an NHS innovation team. Prior to this she worked in market and social research and has been responsible for running national patient and staff surveys with a focus on patient centred care.
Founding Members
The Founding Members of KEPsoft Collaborative are INESC TEC, HUN-REN-KRTK, Óbuda University and the University of Glasgow.
Why support KEPsoft Collaborative?
KEPsoft Collaborative aims to improve access to and reduction of waiting times for a kidney transplant by increasing the number of international KEPs, resulting in a life-changing impact on those suffering from CKD
KEPsoft Collaborative strives to support improved health equity for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities
BAME patients make up an estimated third of kidney transplant waiting lists in the UK and, whilst many can receive a transplant from a white donor, often the best match will be with someone of the same ethnicity.
In general, BAME patients have longer waiting times than white patients due to a shortage of BAME donors in the UK.
KEPsoft offers the opportunity for countries with larger BAME donor pools to share their donors with countries having fewer donors, providing an increased chance of a match for BAME patients
KEPsoft Collaborative helps contribute to financial savings for the healthcare sector by increasing the number of kidney transplants and reducing the treatment burden of CKD.
Increasing pre-emptive kidney transplants (which most often come from living donors) is both cost-saving as well as clinically beneficial to patients, while alternative methods such as earlier and improved diagnosis and improved CKD management are cost-incurring to the NHS.
Compared with current practices, increasing the number of pre-emptive kidney transplantations would lead to a cost reduction of £51.8 million pounds to the NHS over then years.
KEPsoft Collaborative aims to help reduce the environmental burden of CKD treatment.
Dialysis is a resource intensive treatment that involves high power and water consumption, high waste generation and patient and staff travel to the treatment site.
It is estimated that kidney transplantation reduces overall environmental impact of CKD treatment by 90.9-95.7% compared with dialysis.