Following significant interest from kidney patients and families, Kidney Wales has made grant awards towards two research studies that will discover how effective the Covid-19 vaccines are for dialysis patients and those who have received a transplant as treatment for kidney disease.
The first research study, a collaboration between the Wales Kidney Research Unit, Cardiff University and active clinicians at the Cardiff Transplant Unit at the University Hospital of Wales, has recruited over 800 transplant patients and over 100 dialysis patients in order to study the immune response.
For the second, Kidney Wales has joined forces with Kidney Research UK and the National Kidney Federation to back a study led by Imperial College London and the Francis Crick Institute, to investigate specifically how people on haemodialysis respond to the vaccines. This will include further analysis of samples from haemodialysis patients who are involved in the first research study (above), led by the University Hospital of Wales.