Kidney Transplant Breakthrough

According to new John Hopkins research, candidates for kidney transplants who are hard-to-match become twice as likely to survive eight years following a transplant when they receive a treatment designed to make their bodies more accepting of incompatible organs. The pre-surgery protocol works by removing problematic antibodies from the candidate’s blood prior to the transplant.

There are an estimated 20,000 hard-to-match transplant candidates in the U.S., and this pre-surgery protocol could potentially lead to 3,000 more kidney transplants each year.

See Treatment Provides Dramatic Survival Benefit for Hard-To-Match Kidney Transplant Patients, Science Daily, Jul. 28, 2011.