Daily Times

The Pakistan Kidney & Liver Institute (PKLI) and research centre team has collaborated with Stanford University and Harvard School of Public Health for initiating paired kidney donation programme in Pakistan.

The US team will develop a computerised matching module for paired exchange programme using multiple medical practices to offer the best match for both the donor and the recipient. PKLI President and PKLI Chief Executive Officer Dr Professor Saeed Akhtar headed the hospital team which included Medical Director Dr Amiryar Khan and clinical teams from transplant, pathology and intensive care unit departments for these discussions. Dr Chen graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, worked as vice president at United Health and is now headed to Stanford where he intends to complete his doctorate in Health Economics under the supervision of Nobel laureate Al Roth, who is well known for computer mathematical modeling. His research at Stanford focuses on mechanism design in healthcare.

Paired donation is also known as “paired kidney exchange” or “kidney swap.” This donation takes place when there is incompatibility of living kidney donor with the recipient. Such live donor-patient pairs exchange kidneys with each other. As a result, two live donor kidney transplants occur. Paired donation increases match rate significantly so PKLI believes that the launch of this program will bolster Pakistani healthcare sector, especially when a huge number of patients are found to be incompatible with their potential donors. Both sides had a session of open discussions and proposed to formulate a partnership between PKLI, Harvard and Stanford. It was decided that PKLI will involve Punjab Human Organ Transplantation Authority in this process for its consent to proceed further towards preparing a registry of donor/recipient pairs and developing paired exchange mechanism.

PKLI management expressed that such collaborations are part of the institute’s focus on research and development of treatment facilities to ensure the delivery of top-notch healthcare services to patients.

Published in Daily Times, July 12^th 2018.