The largest kidney exchange in Connecticut history occurred between May 9 and June 21 at Yale New Haven Hospital and included nine donor and recipient pairs, according to Totowa, N.J.-based BiologicTx, which said Friday that its kidney paired donation software, BiologicTx MatchGrid, was the matching software used for the exchange.
The kidney chain exchange at Yale New Haven Transplantation Center (YNHTC) was one of the largest for one center in the U.S., Yale said.
The kidney exchange was initiated by an altruistic, non-directed donor, who is someone that voluntarily offers a kidney for donation without any intended recipient, simply to help someone in need, said Tara Marchese, corporate director of marketing for BiologicTx.
That donor, Robin Gilmartin of West Hartford, was the first of 18 people involved in the exchanges, Yale said. Her kidney went to Patricia Villers of Ansonia.
Of the 18 patients, 14 were from Connecticut, two from New York, and one each from New Hampshire and Florida.
“Many of these kidney transplants were quite complex and beyond the level of risk often taken by many transplant centers,” said Dr. David Mulligan, YNHTC director, who called it a “miracle” to bring all the pairs together and complimented Yale New Haven’s staff for their work.
BiologicTx MatchGrid is a software application that provides doctors and clinicians with tools to match living organ donors with patients who have willing, healthy, but incompatible donors. Using advanced matching algorithms, MatchGrid can evaluate all potential matches within a transplant center in minutes. The software can also optimize the number of transplants for a given pool of donor/recipient pairs, ensuring the maximum number of transplants for the most difficult people to match, with the highest quality matches for each transplant in a paired kidney donation network, the company said.
David Jacobs, chief technology officer at BiologicTx, said the application was built for centers like Yale New Haven to help them perform more kidney transplants in a shorter period of time.
