Newsletter: New Hope For Living Donor Transplantation

(I'm almost caught up with the back issues of these...)

Here in another newsletter from The Transplant Experience, an educational and public relations division of Astellas Pharmaceuticals. These free newsletters are intended to educate potential and post-transplant patients regarding the [often] confusing process of this life-altering journey.

"New Hope For Living Donor Transplantation"

Meet Dr. John Friedewald, MDChair, United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) Kidney Committee
Former Chair, UNOS Kidney Paired Donation Workgroup
Associate Professor, Northwestern University, Division of Nephrology

If you are awaiting a new kidney, you may wish to consider living donor transplantation—an option which, in reducing your wait pre-transplant, may also increase your potential for long-term success post-transplant.^1-3 And now, living donor transplantation may be more accessible to more people in need. Just ask Dr. John Friedewald, a nephrologist and chair of the UNOS Kidney Committee, who couldn’t be more excited about the UNOS Kidney Paired Donation (KPD) Pilot Program and the positive impact it can bring to the transplant community.

What is kidney paired donation?

Perhaps a family member, a friend, or even a kindhearted stranger wishes to donate a kidney to you, but you are an incompatible donor-recipient match. Given the specificity of antibody matching, this is not an uncommon situation. KPD works by finding compatible donor-recipient matches among incompatible pairs nationwide—“enabling an exchange and a transplant that is otherwise not possible,” says Dr. Friedewald.

How does the UNOS KPD Program work? Since 2007, local and regional organizations have made well over 700 transplantations possible through KPD.4 The main challenge for these local organizations, however, is the lack of a large, centralized database for pairing individuals, especially the hard-to-match ones. When the UNOS KPD Pilot Program launched in October of last year, the organization aimed to bypass this challenge by connecting all of the individual transplant centers through one system. This is the program's main strength, says Dr. Friedewald—as the first to draw from a national pool of applicants across multiple transplant programs, while coordinated under the oversight of UNOS, it is the first to offer real potential in influencing transplantation at the national level. He cannot emphasize enough the inspiring implications of this program: “As long as you have an interested and healthy living donor, KPD can almost always make an incompatible match work for the donors and recipients involved.”

How can I participate in the UNOS KPD Program? Although the KPD process can be complicated, your transplant team and program coordinators will take care of most of the legwork4: 1. You and your living donor can start by contacting one of the 77 transplant centers participating in the pilot program. Medical screening and evaluation are necessary for approval of your application 2. Your transplant center will submit your paperwork through one of the four UNOS coordinating centers, which will then process your information into the KPD database 3. The KPD database then performs a highly sophisticated algorithm to determine your “virtual match” to a potential living donor 4. Both you and your potential donor will be asked by your respective transplant centers for a final crossmatch—a blood analysis to confirm donor-recipient compatibility 5. If the final crossmatch confirms the virtual match, you and your potential donor will have about two weeks to schedule and prepare for the transplant procedure

To learn more about the UNOS KPD Program, and how it has changed people‘s lives, you can read “Expanding the possibilities: first KPD transplants performed as result of national pilot program.” “To be able to offer patients with end-stage kidney disease such significant improvements to their quality of life”—this is what motivated Dr. Friedewald to enter the transplant field. As the UNOS KPD Pilot Program transitions in the coming months to a full-time program, he is again inspired by the promise of this possibility.

For more information on becoming a living donor and the living donation process, download the “Sharing Life” and “Starting the Conversation” booklets off the Helpful Downloads page under the Support section of www.TransplantExperience.com.

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