Sir Netar Mallick (1935 – )

Netar Mallick was born in Blackburn and studied medicine in Manchester. While still a student he went to  Boston, USA for a year and gained experience in the use of extracorporeal oxygenators   working in paediatric cardiac surgery; experience which stood him good stead when he became involved in dialysis.

As a house surgeon he was involved  in the first use of  Kolff dialysers at Manchester Royal Infirmary (MRI).   Following time in Cardiff where he developed the first automated peritoneal dialysis machine in the UK, he returned in 1967 to MRI, where he spent the rest of his career. This was a difficult period for the growth of nephrology at MRI: in 1968 there was a hepatitis B outbreak in the recently opened dialysis unit with fatalities, and early work in kidney transplantation was not clinically successful. But in due course he developed and led a well-staffed integrated nephrology and transplant service at MRI.  He developed a research focus on immunology applied to clinical renal disease, both in transplantation and glomerular disease, notably minimal change disease and membranous nephropathy.

There was a persisting difficulty across the UK of insufficient resources to treat all those presenting with renal failure, but data were lacking to properly define the need. Mallick and others published data from Blackburn, Exeter and Belfast which provided for the first time a reliable estimate of the incidence of renal failure and therefore the resources needed for treatment.

Mallick became President of the Renal Association in 1986, and drove the development by the Renal Association of the UK Renal Registry as a tool to facilitate health care planning and audit.  He was appointed in 1991 as the first HM Government  Advisor on Renal Disease, and championed with government the need for increasing facilities and staffing, and sufficient funding for high cost therapies, such as erythropoietin.

Netar Mallick was interviewed by John Feehally for Kidney Research UK in 2017 (link)

Last Updated on May 12, 2023 by John Feehally