Kidney exchange at Northwestern

Tomorrow (Wednesday) afternoon I'll be giving the Nancy L. Schwartz Memorial Lecture at Northwestern, and I'll talk a lot about kidney exchange.

So it's a good time to mention a big exchange chain that was completed last month entirely at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, which has one of the biggest living donor transplant programs in the country: Sixteen Patients, Eight Kidney Transplants, Three Days... One Life Changing Event .

This was an innovative non-simultaneous altruistic donor chain, conducted over three days (with 3 transplants done the first day, 3 the second, and 2 the third.)

Here's a page containing (scroll down) a May 19 video interview with the non-directed donor, and two of the transplant docs, John Friedewald and Joseph Leventhal.

Some of my earlier posts on the revolution caused by non-simultaneous chains are below:

Advances in kidney exchange, in the New England Journal of Medicine

Kidney Exchange in People Magazine

Non-simultaneous kidney exchange chains

More non-simultaneous kidney chains

Progress towards a sensibly organized national kidney exchange.

(John Friedewald, the Northwestern transplant nephrologist interviewed about the story at the top of this post, is the chair of the UNOS Kidney Paired Donation Work Group charged with organizing a pilot national program...)