The OPTN Kidney Paired Donation Program --progress report, April 2012

Since opening for business in late 2010, the UNOS/OPTN kidney exchange pilot program has succeeded in enrolling many transplant centers. But so far it has not completed many transplants compared to other kidney exchange networks. (What to do about this was one subject of the recent conference I blogged about here: Competition among kidney exchanges.)

Here's the latest report from UNOS: Everything You Wanted to Know about the OPTN Kidney Paired Donation Program
"The OPTN kidney paired donation pilot program (KPDPP) continues to expand; as of mid-April, 114 transplant centers are participating – view list. The goal is to increase the number of living donor kidney transplants, so center participation is crucial to the success of the national KPD program. Results from recent match runs indicate an upward trend in the number of donors and candidates matched. In the match run conducted in March, 24 matches of compatible potential donors and recipients were found from a pool of 163 donors and 145 candidates, about twice as many matches as the previous month. So far, 19 kidney candidates have received a transplant in the program as of mid-April. "
************

The page at the link contains a link to some background reports, including the one below which (together with the comments) gives some insights into the kind of debates about kidney exchange policies that have been going on at the program:

• Board briefing paper: proposal to include non-directed donors and donor chains in the KPD pilot program  

And here is some of the evidence that long chains are good for kidney patients, particularly for highly sensitized patients:

• Ashlagi, Itai, Duncan S. Gilchrist, Alvin E. Roth, and Michael A. Rees, ; ''Nonsimultaneous Chains and Dominos in Kidney Paired Donation -- Revisited,'' American Journal of Transplantation, 11, 5, May 2011, 984-994.
• Ashlagi, Itai, Duncan S. Gilchrist, Alvin E. Roth, and Michael A. Rees, "NEAD Chains in Transplantation," American Journal of Transplantation, December 2011, 11:2780-2781.