A New Method that Allows Incompatible Kidney Transplant

A study found a new method that will allow a patient to receive an incompatible kidney from a living donor and may lower the risk of death than not doing a transplant at all.

The method is called "desensitization." It allows doctors to change the patients' immune system for their body to be able to accept the then incompatible kidney from a living donor. Desensitization is a process of removing the antibodies that would attack the donated kidney by filtering the patient's blood, Inquistr reported.

"Desensitization is still not for every transplant center," Dr. Dorry Segev of John Hopkins University in Baltimore said. "But the findings show you don't need a compatible living donor to make a transplant happen today - you just need a living donor."

Patients who received kidney from HLA-incompatible live donors may live for eight years. This removes the risks of dying while either waiting for a compatible organ, an organ from a deceased person or not receiving a transplant, a long-terms study says according to Scientific American.

"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," Segev told  Reuters Health. "That's very exciting to those on the waiting list."

The study shows that the group of 1,025 people who received an HLA-incompatible kidney from a living donor had a 77 percent chance to live for another eight years. Chance is 63 percent for 5,125 matched patients who remained on the waiting list for an organ or received an organ from a deceased donor and 44 percent for 5,125 people who remained on the waiting list without receiving an organ.

Segev explained that the study shows how much longer a patient will live compared to waiting on the list for a compatible organ. A lot of patients on the waiting list never found one.