Receiving the right kidney is like winning the lottery. Currently, only 15 to 16 percent of the 100,000 patients on the American kidney transplant waiting list will receive kidney transplants, and only 32 to 34 percent of those transplants will be from live donors.
For kidney patients, the numbers look stark. However, a new desensitization technique that alters immune systems could revolutionize kidney transplants by eliminating the need for compatible donors.
Desensitization works by changing patients' immune systems to help their bodies accept kidneys from incompatible donors. Researchers from the latest study said that patients who received kidney transplants through desensitization were significantly more likely to be alive after eight years compared to those on waiting lists or those who received transplants from deceased donors.
The latest findings from the large national study were published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine are important because they suggest that kidney patients don't need to wait for a compatible donor to undergo lifesaving transplants.
"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," study author Dr. Dorry Segev, a researcher at John Hopkins University, told Reuters Health. "That's very exciting to those on the waiting list."
Study results revealed that 77 percent of the 1,023 patients who received an incompatible kidney under the desensitization technique survived eight years later compared to 63 percent of the 5,125 patients who remained on a waiting list and matched with a live or deceased donor, and 44 percent of the 5,125 patients who remained on the waiting list and did not receive a kidney.
"This multicenter study validated single-center evidence that patients who received kidney transplants from HLA-incompatible live donors had a substantial survival benefit as compared with patients who did not undergo transplantation and those who waited for transplants from deceased donors," researchers concluded in their study.
The new desensitization procedure isn't cheap. It costs around $120,000 total and another $10,000 each year for anti-rejection medication. However, when compared to $100,000 a year for dialysis, desensitization quickly becomes the more economical solution.
"The implications of these results are revolutionary, especially when the numerous contradictory opinions raised by the transplant community are considered," Lionel Rostaing and Paolo Malvezzi of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Grenoble Alpes in La Tronche, France, wrote in an accompanying editorial published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
