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Prof Matthew Griffin

Biography

Matt Griffin has been Professor of Transplant Biology at the National University of Ireland Galway’s School of Medicine since July 2008. He qualified in Medicine from University College Cork, Ireland in 1988 and trained in General Medicine and Nephrology in Cork, Dublin and Mayo Clinic Rochester, USA between 1989 and 1997. He pursued a research fellowship in basic immunology in the laboratory of Dr. Jeffrey Bluestone at The University of Chicago before returning to join the faculty of the Division of Nephrology and Hypertension and the William J von Liebig Transplant Center at Mayo Clinic from 1999 to 2008.

He has been an independently-funded researcher for over 20 years with research interests that include basic and transplant immunology, the pathophysiology of kidney disease and stem cell and regenerative therapies. The scope of his research includes laboratory studies involving cultured cells and disease models as well as immunological profiling studies and early-stage clinical trials in patients. As a REMEDI investigator, he has led research projects funded by Science Foundation Ireland, the European Commission and the Irish Research Council to explore the immunological effects of allogeneic (healthy donor) mesenchymal stromal cells (allo-MSCs) as potential regenerative therapies for a range of disease conditions including diabetic kidney disease, sepsis-associated kidney disease and corneal transplantation.

In recent years, he has coordinated the EU Consortium VISICORT (www.visicort.eu) involving 11 partners from 5 European countries, which has developed a regulator-approved clinical trial protocol for intravenous administration of allo-MSCs to high-risk corneal transplant recipients. In addition, he is the Galway-based principal investigator for the NEPHSTROM clinical trial of intravenous allo-MSCs in patients with progressive loss of kidney function in adults with type 2 diabetes (www.nephstrom.eu). This trial also involves clinical sites in the UK and Italy as well as a collaboration of 4 European cell manufacturing facilities and is funded by the EU Horizon 2020 programme.

Prof. Griffin is a co-principal investigator of CÚRAM, the NUI Galway-led SFI Centre for Research in Medical Devices (www.curamdevices.ie), through which he has developed projects to investigate the interactions between MSCs and immune cells referred to as regulatory T-cells (T-reg) and has coordinated clinical translational support for medical devices research. He also currently serves as the Scientific Director of the NUI Galway Flow Cytometry Core Facility, located in the university’s flagship Biomedical Sciences building. This facility provides access to multi-colour flow cytometry, imaging cytometry, multiplex assays and cell sorting to over 150 researchers from a wide range of disciplines across the NUI Galway campus as well as external industry and academic partners.

Matt has authored over 170 peer-reviewed manuscripts to date (details at: https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=57164320500) and has received grants from a range of funders including NIH (USA), SFI, Health Research Board, Enterprise Ireland, Irish Research Council (Ireland) and the European Commission as well as multiple industry-funded projects. He has placed a high priority on research supervision and career mentoring and has served as primary or co-primary supervisor to 16 MSc students and 13 PhD/MD students in addition to being the primary research/career mentor to 28 post-doctoral researchers from medical and science backgrounds and to 8 researchers in technician, senior technician and project manager posts. Currently, 11 of his former mentees are in research-active academic posts at Assistant, Associate and Full Professor levels in Ireland, USA, China, Belgium and Spain. Three others are in senior scientist or scientific director positions in multinational scientific research-focussed companies. Internationally, he has served on grant review panels for the NIH (USA), the American Society of Nephrology, the NIHR (UK) and other funders and has been Associate/Deputy Editor of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (https://jasn.asnjournals.org/) as well as an editorial board member for other leading nephrology, transplant and general medicine journals.

Since 2017, he has been Head of the Discipline of Medicine of the NUI Galway School of Medicine, taking an active role in undergraduate medical education, faculty recruitment and career advancement and forging closer links between the School of Medicine and the clinical medical disciplines of the Galway University Hospitals (GUH). He is also a practicing nephrologist in the GUH Renal Services with clinical interests in care of organ transplant recipients and patients with acute kidney injury, glomerular diseases and chronic kidney disease. 

Please see here for research publications. Furthermore, for details on our current research endeavours please see our research group page here.