New Kidney Transplant Matching System

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Ira Brody
National Kidney Registry
800-936-1627
ib@kidneyregistry.org
www.kidneyregistry.org

Thousands of Lives and $55 Billion in Health Care Costs
Can Be Saved Through New Kidney Transplant Matching System

New York, NY – June 24, 2008 – Thousands of lives can be saved as well as up to fifty-five billion dollars in health care costs because of a new kidney exchange matching system developed by the National Kidney Registry. The announcement came from Dr. Jonathan Bromberg MD PhD, Chief of the Mt. Sinai Transplantation Institute and Professor of Surgery at Mt. Sinai University Hospital. Prior, to what has been described as a major technological medical breakthrough, facilitating perfect HLA matches in kidney swaps was nearly impossible. In the Registry’s pool of 190 recipients, it has been demonstrated that thirty-three percent of the transplants identified were perfect matches. The remaining matches from the pool, though not perfect, were highly compatible.
Speaking at Mount Sinai University Hospital Garet Hil, Founder and President of the National Kidney Registry, produced evidence on how the thirty-three percent perfect HLA match rate had been achieved. It is the first time a paired exchange matching system has identified such a large number of perfect matches between strangers based on actual patient medical data. Humans have a perfect HLA match when their tissues are immunologically compatible with each other. HLA are proteins located on the surface of white blood cells and other tissues in the body.
In concurring, Dr. Sandip Kapur MD, Chief of Kidney Transplantation at New York Presbyterian/Cornell University Medical Center added, that this matching process will revolutionize living donor transplantation potentially improving outcomes for thousands of patients facing kidney failure while allowing many recipients who have incompatible donors to get transplants and get off dialysis. He went on to explain that, “The evidence indicates that perfect HLA matches between living donors and recipients increase the half life of a transplanted kidney by fifty-five percent thus extending the useful life of the transplanted kidney by ten years and reducing the need for additional transplants.”

The National Kidney Registry is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization with a mission to save and improve the lives of people facing kidney failure by increasing the quality, speed, and number of living donor transplants in the world. A copy of the presentation will be posted to the National Kidney Registry’s web site at www.kidneyregistry.org