Helen Pilmore

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Senior transplant nephrologist, Auckland City Hospital

Helen Pilmore MBChB, MD, FACP, is a senior transplant nephrologist at Auckland City Hospital with a special interest in cardiac disease in kidney transplant recipients. In 1997 she commenced experimental work towards an MD Thesis studying the pathogenesis of Chronic Allograft Nephropathy. This work resulted in a number of publications and experience in bench work including RT-PCR, immunohistochemistry and cell culture attaining the qualification of MD from the University of Otago in 2000.

She has been active in both laboratory and clinical research. She has supervised the work of a number of research fellows in transplantation examining the upregulation of growth factor and fibrosis in transplant biopsies. She has been active in clinical research and has been the primary investigator in Auckland for a number of multi-centre transplantation trials.

Her main current research interest is in the area of cardiac disease in renal transplant recipients examining factors that increase the risk of cardiac events and screening tests to diagnose asymptomatic coronary artery disease. She was the recipient of a Health Research Council grant for the Blocade study, a multi-centre study examining the effects of Carvedilol in dialysis patients and is currently a CI in the CARSK study, a randomised controlled trial of selective versus regular coronary artery screening in patients on the kidney transplant waiting list. This is funded by the NHMRC and the NZ Heart Foundation.

She is a contributor to the recently published KDIGO guidelines for kidney transplant candidates and the primary author of the cardiology guidelines for assessment of kidney transplant recipients. She is a previous chair of the Dialysis, Transplant and Nephrology (DNT) subcommittee of the Australia New Zealand Society of Nephrology (ANZSN) and past treasurer of the ANZSN. Currently she is president-elect for the Transplant Society of Australia and New Zealand (TSANZ).