National Kidney Registry
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| Nonprofit | |
| Industry | |
| Founded | July 12, 2007 |
| Headquarters | Babylon, New York, U.S. |
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Area served
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U.S. |
| Website | kidneyregistry |
The National Kidney Registry (NKR) is the largest paired exchange program in the United States and facilitates over 360 paired exchange transplants annually. The NKR was founded by the Hil family in 2007 after their youngest daughter lost her kidney function at age ten. Both parents were ruled out from donating to their daughter because they were biologically incompatible. Finally, after unsuccessful attempts to find a compatible donor through all of the kidney paired exchange programs in the United States, a compatible donor was found. After their transplant ordeal, the Hil family founded the National Kidney Registry to eliminate the problem of incompatible donors by building a national kidney paired donation program (KPD). Mr. Hil was the first KPD leader to donate one of his kidneys to start a chain. His kidney donation 2015 initiated a swap that facilitated 8 transplants. The success of the NKR has generated significant media coverage including a front page story in the New York Times and nationally televised interviews by Katie Couric with CBS Evening News,Diane Sawyer from ABC News, and Byron Pitts at Nightline.
More than one-third of potential living kidney donors who want to donate their kidney to a friend or family member cannot because of blood type or antibody incompatibility. Historically, these donors would be turned away and the patient would lose the opportunity to receive a life-saving transplant. KPD overcomes donor-recipient incompatibility by swapping kidneys between multiple donor-recipient pairs.
The NKR was founded in 2007 and organized its first swap on Valentine’s Day in 2008 at Cornell Medical Center in New York City. This first swap was a 3-deep chain that ended with a bridge donor who donated two months later, extending the chain to 5-deep. This chain was broken after the bridge donor reneged following many failed cross matches that required the donor to repeatedly go to the hospital for blood draws. The NKR’s second swap started with the shipment of a kidney from Cornell to UCLA. This was the first time a living donor kidney was shipped on a commercial airplane. This second chain crossed the country three times, facilitating eight total transplants at UCLA, Cornell, Stanford and CPMC. Ultimately, this chain was broken when the bridge donor reneged. Based on these early experiences, many safe guards were implemented to reduce the risk of broken chains, which dropped the frequency of broken chains from 33% in 2008 to 2% in 2015.
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