Kidney exchange program in the UK Description

Webpage: National Matching Scheme for Paired and Pooled (kidney) Donation

Short description of the program: NHS Blood and Transplant run the National Matching Scheme for Paired and Pooled (kidney) Donation in the UK. They maintain a database of incompatible (donor,patient) pairs who would be willing to participate in a live-donor kidney exchange with one or more other (donor,patient) pairs. Every three months a matching run is carried out in an attempt to construct an optimal set of exchanges. At present paired (2-way) and pooled (3-way) exchanges are sought, though an exchange involving 3 or more couples has yet to be carried out in the UK. The term "optimal" refers to the fact that the overriding constraint is to maximise the number of transplants that can be carried out, and subject to this, to maximise the overall score of the exchange. The score of an exchange is based on the points system that NHS Blood and Transplant employs for couples involved in the process - see the above webpage for more details. A number of paired kidney donations have been carried out in the UK as a result of this matching scheme, and these have generated much interest in the media - see an article from The Guardian, for example.

Description was given by David F. Manlove.

Recent news: A BBC article and the corresponding video on the first successful 3-way exchange in the UK. A report by the Human Tissue Authority, and a summary about the involvement of the Glasgow algorithm and complexity research group.

References

Johnson, Rachel J.; Allen, Joanne E.; Fuggle, Susan V.; Bradley, J Andrew; Rudge, Chris; on behalf of the Kidney Advisory Group. Early Experience of Paired Living Kidney Donation in the United Kingdom. Transplantation, 86(12) : 1672-1677, 2008.

P. Biró, D.F. Manlove and Romeo Rizzi. Maximum weight cycle packing in directed graphs, with application to kidney exchange programs. Discrete Mathematics, Algorithms and Applications, 1 (4) : 499-517, 2009. An earlier version of this paper is available as Technical Report no. TR-2009-298, Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, 2009.