New Program Aims to Revolutionize Kidney Transplants

A new and innovative program to obtain donor organs, called living donor swap, has the potential to revolutionize kidney transplantation.

The new program, developed at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA, USA) enables the relative or friend of a kidney-transplant patient who is not compatible as a donor to swap organs with another potential donor who also may be an incompatible match for his or her relative or friend. This greatly broadens the pool of organs available from living donors. Currently, about two-thirds of kidney transplants are performed with organs taken from deceased donors, and the wait can often be as long as five years, making living-donor transplantation an attractive alternative. Living donors, often family or friends of the transplant patient, currently account for about one third of cases.

"Swapping organs makes sense in such cases,” said Albin Gritsch, M.D., a UCLA urologist. "In the case of a living donor swap, both transplants are done simultaneously; advances in living-donor-transplant technology make the surgery less invasive and the pain easier to manage.”

A similar approach was developed by investigators at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (Baltimore, MD, USA) where living, non-directed (LND) kidney donations matched in a "domino paired donation” model resulted in a 60% increase in organ matching.


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University of California Los Angeles
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine