Research Group

  • Dr Chirag Parikh, Principal Investigator
  • MD Mona Doshi, Co-Investigator
  • MD Bernd Schroppel, Co-Investigator

Location

  • Yale University, New Haven, USA

Title

  • New Method to Assess Health of Kidney Graft

Kidney transplantation is the treatment of choice for most people with end-stage kidney disease as it improves both quantity and quality of life and costs less than chronic dialysis. Due to a major shortage of kidneys available for transplant, over 20% of those waiting for a kidney die or are removed from the list before an organ becomes available. This shortage has driven efforts to expand the organ supply by using kidneys from higher-risk deceased donors, which has led to high organ discard rates and increasing numbers of transplant recipients with poor kidney graft function. The United Network for Organ Sharing recently proposed using the Kidney Donor Risk Index (KDRI) to better estimate deceased-donor kidney quality before transplant, but this score needs to be further tested before it can be more widely used in clinical practice. There is also increasing evidence that suggests non-invasive urine biomarkers could help determine kidney quality in deceased donors during the organ allocation process.

This is one of the largest applied translational research studies in kidney transplantation, which is designed to validate the KDRI in 1500 deceased kidney donors and recipients while evaluating the added utility of eight different urine biomarkers at the time of organ procurement. Early, accurate and non-invasive quality assessment is needed to optimize decisions about which donated kidneys should be discarded, biopsied and/or transported to recipients using more expensive methods like machine pump perfusion. Ultimately, such a donor kidney quality assessment could inform organ allocation policies and reduce the number and severity of complications in transplant recipients.

Final Report