One kidney saves eight lives
It all started with a Virginia man who offered his kidney to a woman from his parish who needed one. They had never met but Thomas F. Koontz thought the donation would be a good way to give back to God, whom he credited with saving his teenage daughter's brain cancer. The woman from church ended up finding a different donor. So Koontz called Johns Hopkins. He offered his kidney to anyone who might needed it,
His completely selfless act started a chain of events that would allow not just one person to get a desperately needed kidney, but eight people who needed new organs to keep them alive.
Surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital this morning held a press conference to announce that they -- along with doctors from hospitals in Oklahoma City, St. Louis and Detroit -- had performed a record feat. They completed an eight-way, multi-hospital, domino kidney transplant. This swap required seven pairs of people -- each made up of one person in need of a kidney and one willing to donate, but whose blood or tissue type was incompatible with the intended recipient. A computer program was fed all of the potential donor pairs and devised a complicated exchange that took place over the course of three weeks and involved several kidneys being flown around the country. At the end of the line was someone who didn't have a live donor offering a kidney, a woman who received her kidney at Hopkins last night. She was the ultimate recipient of Koontz's largesse.
"At the end of the chain, that kidney still goes to someone in great need," said Dr. Robert Montgomery, the Hopkins doc who led the transplant team. "But along the way, you're able to accomplish two, three, four, eight transplants. ...
"These are all ways of trying to optimize the number of people who are able to receive life-saving transplants."
Hopkins has been doing this for years and the number of kidneys transplanted each time seems to keep rising. At first, it may seem like a publicity stunt, an effort to outdo themselves just for the sake of it. But that is not what goes on here. The more people involved, the more people who benefit from a single kidney donation.
Montgomery says he hopes this will go a long way to address the biggest limitation in the number of kidney transplants that can be done: There aren't enough kidneys to go around.
"A transplant surgeon can maybe do 2,000 surgeries in a lifetime," he said. "The work that we're doing here will be responsible for thousands and thousands of transplants.
"What could be better?"
Baltimore Sun photo of Dr. Robert Montgomery
