Tuesday, May 25, 2010

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:




(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...)

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