Donate Life America and the Fresenius Medical Care Foundation have partnered to launch a universal living donor kidney registry and an at-home living donor testing kit to reduce wait times for those on the national kidney transplant list, the organizations announced in an Oct. 22 news release.
The Foundation, a Fresenius Medical Care North America nonprofit, donated an initial $500,000 to DLA in the joint effort to improve living kidney donor access.
The National Donate Life Living Donor Registry will be the first national registry of its kind. It will allow the public to register interest in becoming a living donor and will produce preliminary matching results from the at-home testing kits. The registry, working with the United Network for Organ Sharing and other transplant programs, will allow potential living donors and recipients to find matches across the country. The living registry will be added to the existing National Donate Life Registry, which tracks deceased organ, eye and tissue donors.
The at-home living donor testing kits will use saliva samples to identify and register potential living kidney donors, with a wait time for living donor transplants of one year or less, compared to three to seven years for deceased donor transplants.
The initiatives will be piloted through February 2020 and are predicted to launch in the spring of 2020.
"We expect to nearly double the number of successful matches within one year of launch, leading to reduced average transplant waiting times for people living with kidney disease," Bill Valle, CEO of Fresenius Medical Care North America and president of the foundation, said in the news release.