Last night, at the New York Academy of Medicine, Garet Hil, Founder and CEO of the National Kidney Registry, announced the completion of the first release of Best Match, the NKR’s state-of-the-art kidney matching system.
The announcement was made at a gathering of transplant professionals. According to Hil, the software integrates a full featured web-based contact management system with the most advanced kidney matching system built from the ground up to support donor chain matching. Best Match has the potential to revolutionize living donor transplants by increasing the quality, speed and number of transplants performed.
In a pilot at a leading New York transplant center, Best Match identified 12 paired exchange transplants in a small pool of only 29 incompatible pairs utilizing one non-directed altruistic donor. Utilizing the NKR’s cluster leapfrog scheduling approach, the 12 transplants can take as little as twelve weeks to perform.
In simulations using 1,923 actual HLA and blood type profiles from a major histocompatibility laboratory, Best Match found perfect six antigen matches in 15%-33% of the transplants identified in pool sizes ranging from 100-300. The majority of the matches identified in pool sizes above 50 were equal to or better than a three antigen match that is typical between a parent and a child.
“The coding of the core systems was an extreme challenge but I am very pleased with the results,” said Rich Marta, the senior engineer who led the software development project. Tom Mollo, Executive Director of the Registry commented, “Within the next few months we will launch the KidneyLife network which will allow all transplant centers in the United States to leverage our Best Match system and our rapidly expanding pool of non-directed donors and incompatible pairs.”
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