A computer algorithm developed at Carnegie Mellon University matched living kidney donors with medically compatible transplant candidates late last month as the national Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN), operated by the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), began a national pilot program to increase the number of kidney paired-donation (KPD) transplants.
The initial run of the computer matching process included just 43 kidney transplant candidates and 45 potential living donors, but a national KPD pool eventually could include as many as 10,000 donor-recipient pairs. Each pair includes a potential donor who is not medically compatible with his or her original intended recipient, or is less than an optimal match.
In the matching process, the computer looks for new combinations between the pairs based on compatible blood and tissue types. For example, in a two-way exchange, the donor from one pair is matched with a compatible recipient from a second pair, while the donor from the second pair is matched with the recipient from the first pair.
In the initial run, three-way exchanges also were calculated.Establishing a national pool could boost kidney transplants because the chances of finding compatible matches increase as the size of the exchange pool grows. Smaller, existing kidney exchanges, which take these incompatible donor-recipient pairs and match them with other donor-recipient pairs, already have boosted the number of KPD transplants.
In the last three years, exchanges have enabled more than 700 kidney transplants that otherwise would not have occurred. Two of those exchanges have used the Carnegie Mellon computer algorithm to match pairs.
