Source: Good News Network
For the first time in history, a person living with HIV has donated a kidney to a transplant recipient also living with HIV.
A multidisciplinary team from Johns Hopkins Medicine completed the living donor HIV-to-HIV kidney transplant earlier this week and doctors say that both the donor and the recipient are doing well.
“This is the first time someone living with HIV has been allowed to donate a kidney, ever, in the world, and that’s huge,” says Dorry Segev, professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “A disease that was a death sentence in the 1980s has become one so well-controlled that those living with HIV can now save lives with kidney donation—that’s incredible.”
People living with HIV haven’t been able to donate kidneys until now, because there were worries that HIV was too much of a risk factor for kidney disease in the donor. However, Segev and colleagues’ recent research on over 40,000 people living with HIV showed that the new antiretroviral drugs are safe for the kidney, and that those with well-controlled HIV have basically the same risks as those without HIV and are healthy enough to donate kidneys.
“What’s meaningful about the first living kidney donor—who is also living with HIV—is that this advances medicine while defeating stigma, too. It challenges providers and the public to see HIV differently,” says Christine Durand, associate professor of medicine and oncology at the university. “As patients waiting for a transplant see that we’re working with as many donors as possible to save as many lives as possible, we’re giving them hope. Every successful transplant shortens the waitlist for all patients, no matter their HIV status.”
Durand and Segev are leading HOPE in Action, an effort that encompasses multiple national studies exploring the feasibility, safety, and effectiveness of HIV-to-HIV transplantation. This innovation was made possible by Segev’s conception of and advocacy for the 2013 federal HIV Organ Policy Equity Act (the HOPE Act).
In addition to leading the team that performed the first deceased donor HOPE transplants in the United States in 2016, they are leading two NIH-funded trials of HIV-to-HIV kidney and liver transplants. This first-ever living kidney donor transplant is the next major milestone in HOPE.
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Nina Martinez, the 35-year-old kidney donor living with HIV, unknowingly contracted the virus as a result of a blood transfusion she received as an infant. She and her family did not realize that she was HIV-positive until she was 8 years old.
Thanks to a regimen of antiviral treatments, however, she lives a healthy life as a public health consultant, marathon runner, clinical research volunteer, and policy advocate dedicated to eliminating the stigma still surrounding HIV – and this latest operation is just another example of how she is successful in doing so.
“Don’t call me a hero, call me the first,” said Martinez. “I want to see who comes next.”
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