ABO incompatible kidney transplantation, strategies and successes
Marta Crespo Barrio (ES)
Head of the Nephrology department · Nephrology Department and Kidney transplant Unit · Hospital del Mar · Barcelona
Marta Crespo accomplished her specialization at the Nephrology Department in Hospital Ramón y Cajal, Madrid. She completed her training in kidney transplantation at Massachusetts General Hospital-Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, and presented her thesis on humoral mechanisms of rejection not well defined at the time (2002). Her interest and training has focused in the role of antibodies in transplantation. Since 2006 at the Nephrology Dpt at Hospital del Mar in Barcelona (Spain), she has organized uni- and multicenter studies supported by public competitive grants. She has combined clinical and research activity with stays at the Immunogenetics Laboratory of Leiden University Medical Center in The Netherlands under the direction of Prof. Frans Claas (2012), the Immunogenetics Laboratory at UCLA in US with Prof. Elaine Reed (2015-16) and at the Nephrology Lab of dr Paolo Cravedi at Hospital Mount Sinai in New York (August-Dec 2025) to continue deciphering the mechanisms involved in antibody-mediated rejection focused on the role of T cells.
From 2016 to 2021, Head of the Transplant Unit at Hospital del Mar, her main objectives focused on establishing a better monitoring of transplant recipients to adequately adjust immunosuppression with a group of active clinical and research collaborators. She explores the best options for HLA sensitized patients to access kidney transplantation and she is very interested in the continuous improvement of the quality of care of the transplant recipient and the living donor. Since May 2021, she is Chief of the Nephrology Department and Renal Transplant Unit at Hospital del Mar, as well as the coordinator of the Research Group in Nephropathy at Hospital del Mar Research Institute.
She was on the Board of the Spanish Society of Nephrology and the Spanish Society of Transplantation (2014-2020) and the Board of the Descartes Transplantation Group of the European Renal Association (2016-2023, named Distinguished Fellow of the European Renal Association in 2025). She was the coordinator of the Transplant Group of the Spanish Society of Nephrology (2018-2024) and still the organizer of the nephrology fellows yearly transplant course “Transplantation in action”. She joined the STAR and ENGAGE groups in 2021.
Professor Crespo teaches and coordinates teaching of Nephrology at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. She has published more than 200 articles in scientific journals (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/marta.crespo.1/bibliography/public/) , has participated in over 250 communications in scientific meetings and has been guest speaker in more than 100 courses or medical congresses. She has been and/or is director of 5 PhD thesis and 7 master degree thesis.
Interested in social communication and the audiovisual world, she is co-founder of El Largo Viaje audiovisual productions with which she has promoted projects to disseminate kidney disease and solid-organ transplantation, as well as other types of creations. She has recently co-created a documentary titled “Transplanting the world” on the experience of 7 deceased transplant recipients in 3 continents. She has also participated in voluntary activities in Ecuador and Guatemala.