Organ Donation - April '08
Kidney Donation: A perfect match
Michael Rees, MD
Nearly 75,000 Americans are waiting for a kidney on the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network waiting list. Until recently, the only thing patients could do was wait, possibly years, on an organ transplant list, with no guarantee of ever receiving a kidney. Even if a patient has a willing donor, such as a spouse or child, their body chemistry can prevent a successful match.
Alliance for Paired Donation: A mission for life
“The focus in my life has been trying to alleviate donor shortage,” says Michael Rees, MD, associate professor and medical director of the Human Donation Science Program at The University of Toledo Medical Center. “Living donor kidneys are best because they have a 95- to 97-percent success rate and last an average of sixteen years, compared to a deceased organ donor’s eight years.”
Most organ donation programs only match a donor with a recipient, and the process ends after that. The Alliance for Paired Donation Program does things differently. The recipient and his or her incompatible, but willing, donor go on a list where they can be matched with two other people in the same situation. By “swapping,” both patients receive kidney transplants that would not otherwise have been possible.
“Another program available through the Alliance for Paired Donation is the never-ending altruistic donor method, which creates a chain of donations,” Dr. Rees says. Altruistic donors are people who generously offer to give their kidney to someone in need. “Because kidney disease is an increasing problem in America, some donors want to give their kidneys to people they don’t know just because they can,” says Dr. Rees.
The chain works like this: a compatible altruistic donor donates a kidney to a patient whose willing donor can’t donate to them, most often because they are the wrong blood type. The unused willing donor then donates a kidney to a different compatible patient, and so forth. “You can’t pay someone back for giving your loved one a kidney, but you can pay it forward by giving your kidney to someone else in need,” Dr. Rees says.
Easier said than done
“I heard about paired kidney donation in 2000 and saw it as a great way to overcome the organ shortage,” says Dr. Rees. “It’s a complicated process. I needed to partner with other transplant programs to get a bigger pool, and I needed a computer program to match donors and recipients.”
Even after a grant approval to create the Alliance for Paired Donation, Dr. Rees found that it would take much more than that. “We needed a lot more money to have someone write the computer program,” Dr. Rees says. “In the year 2000, my dad asked me what I wanted for Christmas. My only wish was the program and my dad spent 500 hours writing it for me as a present.”
Growing hope
After the program was written, Dr. Rees partnered with the Ohio Solid Organ Transplantation Consortium to start the world’s first group of computerized paired donation matching. Subsequently, Jon Kopke at the University of Cincinnati re-wrote the software to transform it into the web-based program used today. The organization has grown to 60 participating transplant centers in 21 states. “I think one day we will be able to give an additional 3,000 people a needed transplant,” Dr. Rees adds. Last year, there were 17,000 transplants, 7,000 of which were from living donors. Dr. Rees hopes to see increase living donor transplants increase to 10,000 per year, and believes the Alliance for Paired Donation can play a significant role in this increase.
With the highest success rates ever, kidney transplants are helping patients to live longer, happier lives. April is National Donate Life Month and living donation can offer the ultimate gift – more time. “With a kidney donation, you aren’t just giving a patient a better quality of life, you are saving their life,” says Dr. Rees.
For more information on the paired kidney donation program or organ transplant services, call 877-451-2299.
