France conducts world’s first eight-person kidney transplant
Four hospitals worked together to perform the ‘new milestone’ in transplant history
The four transplants took place simultaneously at a hospital in Reims
Donenko Oleksii/Shutterstock
Four people in France have had their lives saved after a world-first kidney transplant operation in which eight people were operated on simultaneously.
The procedure took place at the centre hospitalier universitaire (CHU) in Reims (Grand Est), in a procedure also coordinated with help from the CHUs of Montpellier, Toulouse (Occitanie) and Geneva (Switzerland).
Eight people were operated on, with four recipients receiving a kidney each from four living organ donors.
“Four donor-recipient pairs underwent coordinated surgery as part of a cross-donation of kidneys involving living donors,” explained a joint statement from the four hospitals involved on May 26.
The procedure comes two years after the hospitals made headlines with a similar procedure, that time with three simultaneous transplants (involving six people). This procedure added one more transplant, in what the hospitals called “a new milestone”.
“[This] marks a turning point in the development of living-donor kidney transplants in France and in international collaboration,” said the statement.
Overcoming incompatibility
Performing the operations together enables the specialists to overcome a major problem that can affect transplants; incompatibility between donors and recipients.
The statement explained: “‘It enables the overcoming of blood and/or immunological incompatibility between a living donor and their sick relative. It involves matching several donor/recipient pairs that are incompatible with one another, but cross-compatible and anonymous, with another pair.”
It comes after a bioethics law, la loi bioéthique du 2 août 2021, increased the number of donor/recipient pairs allowed in such a procedure from two to six.
Expanding the number helps to “increase matching opportunities and improve access to transplants for patients with end-stage chronic kidney disease (insuffisance rénale chronique terminale, IRCT),” the statement said.
The four transplants had to take place simultaneously in part because there is a limited window of time once a kidney has been removed from a donor before it starts to deteriorate.
There is a much bigger chance of success if the kidneys are moved quickly from the donor to the recipient.
The four hospitals have been working together to enable simultaneous procedures for some time, and now aim to continue the project to reduce donor incompatibility in more organ recipients.
This kind of procedure is relatively common in the UK, “where more than a hundred cross-donation kidney transplants are performed each year”, the hospitals’ statement added.
