After years of research into kidney exchange, a group of researchers from four European non-profit institutions is now moving forward with the creation of a company that will expand opportunities for patients with chronic kidney disease in their search for compatible transplant donors. The spin-off will address the devastating impact that chronic kidney failure has on patients’ lives, as well as the shortage of living donors for transplants – a treatment option that ensures a better quality of life and better long-term survival prospects, when compared to dialysis.
Chronic kidney disease is a long-term condition that leads to loss of kidney function, becoming progressively more debilitating. When kidney function becomes insufficient, replacement treatments are required: dialysis or kidney transplantation.
The software has been used (in a testing phase) by several partner organisations that coordinate kidney exchange programmes (KEPs) to identify compatibility between patients and potential donors within a population and optimise the number of transplants that can be performed.
Compared to deceased donor transplantation, living donor transplantation ensures better long-term outcomes for the patients who receive it. However, blood and/or tissue incompatibility between the donor and patient can prevent a living donor from donating a kidney to a person in need.
KEPs help overcome this obstacle, by allowing patients in need of a kidney transplant – who have a donor available but incompatible – to “swap” their donors, creating a cycle of transplants.
In practical terms, people who volunteer to donate organs to someone they know, but with whom they are not compatible can, with the help of these programmes, find unknown recipients with whom they are compatible – thus enabling a patient who otherwise would not have been able to receive a transplant to do so.
Initially, the KEPsoft Collaborative will focus on European transplantation organisations; however, plans include collaborating with organisations outside Europe, where many countries still lack KEPs. In fact, it is estimated that approximately 850 million people worldwide suffer from kidney disease.
Ana Viana, a researcher at INESC TEC and one of the founders of KEPsoft Collaborative, believes that “KEPsoft Collaborative is the epitome of doing science with impact”. The researcher recalled that this “is the result of many years of collaboration between several European teams whose common goal was to make a contribution to society, granting new opportunities for a better and healthier life to patients suffering from a devastating disease.”
“Our INESC TEC team started developing models and algorithms for KEPs in 2008. Later, when the Portuguese KEP was launched, these same algorithms were used to identify and select pairs for transplantation at the national level. This was a challenging opportunity for us, and we learned a lot,” she said.
Xenia Klimentova, also a researcher at INESC TEC, mentioned that “over the past decade, our research on optimisation problems in KEPs has established a solid theoretical foundation for future developments that will meet the needs of National Transplant Organisations.” Xenia is convinced that “the team’s experience will allow it to provide essential support to policy makers, both nationally and internationally.”
In addition to INESC TEC, the spin-off also features the Budapest-based HUN-REN Centre for Economic and Regional Studies (KRTK), the University of Óbuda, and the University of Glasgow. Ana Viana emphasised that “the collaboration with fellow experts from Hungary and Scotland has made the dream of operating internationally come true”, and that “this is a lasting partnership that will continue through the KEPsoft Collaborative”.
David Manlove, professor at the University of Glasgow and scientific advisor to the KEPsoft Collaborative, explained that “the goal is to make kidney transplantation more accessible to patients across Europe and beyond.”
“We are very pleased and proud to know that our work will finally benefit end users, potentially saving hundreds of lives in the coming years across Europe and the rest of the world,” said Péter Biró, senior researcher at HUN-REN KRTK.
More information on https://kepsoft.org/
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