Identifying Opportunities to Increase the Throughput of Kidney Paired Donation

Matching Kidneys with Priority in Kidney Exchange Programs

Kidney exchanges were developed to match kidney failure patients with willing but incompatible donors to other donor-patient pairs. Finding a match in a large candidate pool can be modeled as an integer program. However, these exchanges accumulate participants with characteristics that increase the difficulty of finding a match and, therefore, increase patients’ waiting time. Therefore, we sought to fine-tune the formulation of the integer program by more accurately assigning priorities to patients based on their difficulty of matching. We provide a detailed formulation of prioritized kidney exchange and propose a novel prioritization algorithm. Our approach takes advantage of the global knowledge of the donor-patient compatibility within a pool of pairs and calculates an iterative, paired match power (iPMP) to represent the donor-patient pairs’ abilities to match. Monte Carlo simulation shows that an algorithm using the iPMP reduces the waiting time more than using paired match power (PMP) for the difficult-to-match pairs with hazard ratios of 1.3480 and 1.1100, respectively. Thus, the iPMP may be a more accurate assessment of the difficulty of matching a pair in a pool than PMP is, and its use may improve matching algorithms being used to match donors and recipients.

Ethical and Logistical Issues Raised by the Advanced Donation Program "Pay It Forward" Scheme

The advanced donation program was proposed in 2014 to allow an individual to donate a kidney in order to provide a voucher for a kidney in the future for a particular loved one. In this article, we explore the logistical and ethical issues that such a program raises. We argue that such a program is ethical in principle but there are many logistical issues that need to be addressed to ensure that the actual program is fair to both those who do and do not participate in this program.

Kidney Exchange to Overcome Financial Barriers to Kidney Transplantation

Organ shortage is the major limitation to kidney transplantation in the developed world. Conversely, millions of patients in the developing world with end-stage renal disease die because they cannot afford renal replacement therapy-even when willing living kidney donors exist. This juxtaposition between countries with funds but no available kidneys and those with available kidneys but no funds prompts us to propose an exchange program using each nation's unique assets. Our proposal leverages the cost savings achieved through earlier transplantation over dialysis to fund the cost of kidney exchange between developed-world patient-donor pairs with immunological barriers and developing-world patient-donor pairs with financial barriers. By making developed-world health care available to impoverished patients in the developing world, we replace unethical transplant tourism with global kidney exchange-a modality equally benefitting rich and poor. We report the 1-year experience of an initial Filipino pair, whose recipient was transplanted in the United states with an American donor's kidney at no cost to him. The Filipino donor donated to an American in the United States through a kidney exchange chain. Follow-up care and medications in the Philippines were supported by funds from the United States. We show that the logistical obstacles in this approach, although considerable, are surmountable.

Current status on the evaluation and management of the highly sensitized kidney transplant recipient

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

In light of the recent changes to the kidney allocation system (KAS) and the observed increase in the rate of transplantation of the highly sensitized kidney transplant candidate, the evaluation and care of this population is a timely topic.

RECENT FINDINGS

In its first year, the new KAS has already realized one goal of improving the chances of transplanting the most highly sensitized patients in the waiting list. This has brought to the forefront the need for recipient readiness in this special population, as well as the need for histocompatibility labs and kidney transplant programs to align themselves with each other, and also with the requirements of the United Network for Organ Sharing, and increase proficiency in testing and data interpretation. This manuscript is a review of the literature as well as practice patterns as they relate to the changes in KAS and the observed outcome since the activation of the new KAS, with the ultimate goal of aiding in the development of a more unified approach in the care of this specialized population which will allow for interdisciplinary and cross centre dialogue to optimize long term care and outcomes.

SUMMARY

Here we will review the changes to the KAS as they affect the highly sensitized kidney transplant recipient, and additional considerations in the evaluation and management of these patients.