Patients experiencing kidney failure or defects who are on the waiting list for the perfect donor will be happy to hear that a evolutionary procedure has been developed to allow kidney transplants even from an incompatible donor, thus saving them time and increasing their chance of survival.
The method, called as desensitization, will alter the immune system of the patient until it adjusts to the kidney from an incompatible donor. The technique has proven to extend patients' lives up to eight years compared to those who spend years on the waiting list to receive organs from deceased donors and have been undergoing the life-draining process of dialysis.
Desensitization involves filtering of antibodies in the patient's blood. In this process, the patient is given an infusion of other antibodies to provide some protection while the body adjusts and forms its own antibodies that were found out not to attack the new organ anymore.
Further, lead researcher Dr. Dorry Segev of John Hopkins University in Baltimore said that the patient will undergo another drug treatment targeting white blood cells in case the antibodies are still attacking the new kidney transplant.
The researchers in the study compared the survival rates of 1,025 recipients of kidney transplants from HLA-incompatible live donors and those in the control group who were on the waiting list looking for their kidney donor. The study was conducted in 22 centers in the US.
The results showed that patients with anti-HLA antibodies live up to eight years compared to patients on the waiting list and have been waiting for a donor and those who did not undergo a transplant procedure.
"We used to say if you had a compatible donor, you could do a transplant. Now you can say, if you have an incompatible donor, we still can make that transplant happen. That's very exciting to those on the waiting list," Segev said in an interview.
Aside from desensitization, doctors have devised a method called kidney exchange to give patients with incompatible live kidney donors the chance to look around and swap donors who may be compatible to them.
The study was published in the March 10 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.
