ERGOT Faculty, Macey Henderson, JD PhD, was elected to a 3-year term on the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) Board of Directors. Henderson will serve as a Patient and Donors Affairs Representative. The Board of Directors is the governing body that oversees and participates in developing policies for operating the OPTN that provide equitable organ allocation to patients registered on the national waiting list, ensure quality standards for membership, and establish data submission requirements. Currently, the same board that serves the OPTN also serves the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the organization that holds the contract to operate the OPTN.
Emory Transplant Center performs its first HIV-positive kidney transplant from HIV-positive deceased donor
In a time of greatest tragedy, this donor family made a powerful decision to save the lives people waiting on a transplant. That decision was generous and compassionate. Registered organ donors, and their families, are the people who make organ donation and transplantation possible. With the hard work of our colleagues at Emory and Lifelink, the HOPE Act will save hundreds–even thousands–of lives over the next decade through safe HIV-HIV kidney and liver transplantation.
We hope that other people living with HIV will be inspired by the compassion of this organ donor and donor family, and register their decision to save lives at registerme.org.
We’re honored that these donors and families have made the decision to save lives through organ donation under the HOPE in Action study. With hard work and collaboration between Johns Hopkins, our transplant center partners, and organ procurement organizations across the country, in 2016 we were able to help 20 patients with HIV live fuller, longer, healthier lives after receiving HOPE transplants.
Our research indicates that thousands of lives could be saved by HOPE transplants in the next decade – both those with and without HIV infection who are waiting on the same transplant lists in need of a life-saving transplant. That is a powerful and lasting legacy, and we hope it provides these special donor families some small measure of comfort as they mourn the loss of loved ones.
Every day, when we walk into Johns Hopkins to serve patients and advance the field of transplantation, we are inspired to do our best by the generous patients, donors and families who make our research possible.
With continued hard work by our whole team at Hopkins and beyond, we hope to honor these amazing donors, donor families, and HOPE transplant recipients. We look forward to saving many more lives in 2017 and beyond through safe, legal HIV-HIV organ donation and transplantation under the HOPE Act.
Five of ERGOT’s developed transplant models can be found at transplantmodels.com.
Living Donor Risk Index (LKDPI)
This model predicts recipient risk of graft loss after living donor kidney transplantation based on donor characteristics, on the same scale as the KDPI.
ESRD Risk Tool for Kidney Donor Candidates
This model is intended for low-risk adults considering living kidney donation in the United States. It provides an estimate of 15-year and lifetime incidence of end-stage renal disease.
Infectious Risk Donors
When a patient with end stage renal disease (ESRD) on the waitlist for a kidney is offered an Infectious Risk Donor (IRD) kidney, they need to decide whether they will accept the IRD kidney and the associated infectious risk, or if they will decline it and continue to wait for the next available infectious-risk free kidney.
Transplant Candidacy for Patients 65+
This prediction model is intended for adults with ESRD on dialysis aged 65 and above; it provides the predicted probability of 3-year survival after kidney transplantation (KT). Patients with predicted 3-year post-KT survival in the top quintile are deemed “excellent” candidates.
Pediatric Transplant: Living or deceased donor first?
Most pediatric kidney transplant recipients live long enough to require retransplantation. The most beneficial timing for living donor transplantation in candidates with one living donor is not clear.
Congratulations to ERGOT’s Dr. Allan Massie, whose article A Risk Index for Living Donor Kidney Transplantation was named one of the Top 10 Accessed Articles in 2016 by AST, ASTS, and AJT!
ERGOT Faculty Macey Henderson, JD PhD has been nominated for UNOS Board of Directors 2017!
A kidney donor herself, Dr. Henderson applies her background in law, ethics, health policy and management to support her research into health outcomes of live kidney donors and transplant patients.
OPTN/UNOS member voting representatives will receive a ballot and biographical information for the nominees in early 2017.
You can follow Macey on twitter @MaceyLHenderson.
Dr. Allan Massie’s A Risk Index for Living Donor Kidney Transplantation was listed as one of the Top 10 Most Accessed Articles of 2016.
Choosing between multiple living kidney donors, or evaluating offers in kidney paired donation, can be challenging because no metric currently exists for living donor quality. Furthermore, some deceased donor (DD) kidneys can result in better outcomes than some living donor kidneys, yet there is no way to compare them on the same scale. To better inform clinical decision-making, we created a living kidney donor profile index (LKDPI) on the same scale as the DD KDPI, using Cox regression and adjusting for recipient characteristics.
The article was published in the July issue of The American Journal of Transplantation.
Completing the trilogy of papers published in the December issue of the American Journal of Transplantation that was dedicated to living donors, our lab looks for Patterns of End-Stage Renal Disease Caused by Diabetes, Hypertension, and Glomerulonephritis in Live Kidney Donors.
We looked at studies averaging less than 10 years of follow-up to better understand postdonation ESRD.
Following the American Journal of Transplantation’s theme of giving for their December article, they published our paper featuring our Smartphone App for Increasing Live Organ Donation.
The idea came from talking to waitlisted candidates for kidney transplant who reported substantial barriers to identifying a live donor. Our app aims to help ESRD patients eligible for transplantation create a dialog that tells their story and helps them reach out to friends and family through social medias.
That app, as of this blog post, is still in development.
