New Technology to Increase Number of Kidney Exchanges

Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have devised a way to more efficiently match kidney donors with kidney recipients, helping to save many people lives. This new method, which uses a series of steps called an algorithm to match the donors with the recipients, will allow living donors to match with recipients that are unrelated to them in a much more time-efficient manner. Actually, these types of kidney transactions are called kidney exchanges, because both party members are still living.

In the transplant world, kidney exchanges are thought to be the best way of increasing the number kidney transplants, considering that the recipients do not have to wait for someone to die before they can get a kidney. Plus, the kidney pool is much larger among the living than among the dead. Currently in the United States, more than 70,000 are on the kidney waiting list, with roughly 4,000 dying each year because they could not get one in time.

The new method enables doctors to match donors not one by one, but rather four by four, meaning that four donors can be matched to four recipients at the same time, greatly reducing the wait for those on the waiting list. And since the program can draw from the living donors, the program can be nationalized, enabling anyone from anywhere to receive a kidney from virtually anywhere.

The Alliance for Paired Donation, an organization that connects 50 transplant centers in 15 states, started using the program last December. Dr. Michael Rees of the University of Toledo Medical Center, who is also the director of Alliance, states that their ability to match donor to recipient has increased tenfold, particularly due to the four-way exchange and the fact that the program incorporates altruistic donors, or kidneys that have no specified recipients and can be given to anyone. For instance, a match found by the program that was run in early May found four potential two-way exchanges, three three-way exchanges and one four-way exchange among about 100 donor-patient pairs and seven altruistic donors. Dr. Rees stated that previous methods would have only found one two-way exchange.