MIKEL PRIETO: Today I want to talk to you about kidney paired donation. This is one option that we have developed over the last couple of years at Mayo Clinic. It allows us to do more transplants and allows us to give to our patients a better option of a better matched kidney. Kidney paired donation is essentially when we take somebody's living donor, and we give that kidney to somebody else in exchange for getting a kidney from somebody else for our recipient.

Sometimes this is absolutely necessary because the donor that the patient brings is incompatible from the point of view, or the blood group, or some other issue. Other times it's just we can find a better kidney. For example, an older father may find that a younger kidney for his son is better than his own kidney. Well, we can use that kidney to help somebody else, perhaps in the wrong blood group.

Kidney paired donation has become an important part of what we do. About 25% of the kidney transplants we do right now at Mayo Clinic are done in this fashion. So we end up having chains of patients being transplanted at the same time, each one with a donor that they haven't met yet. These patients typically meet after the transplant and become lifelong friends.

There's multiple areas where people benefit from this. One is you get a better matched kidney for you. Second, as a donor, it's satisfying to know that not only you helped your loved one or your relative, but you helped other people. At the end, it becomes a community of people that have all received transplants, all successfully, and that everybody feels good about these multiple-transplant situations and we are exchanging kidneys from one place to another. Sometimes we send kidneys to a different hospital. Within our three hospitals at Mayo Clinic, we have done a fair amount of paired donor transplants.

We strongly encourage people that come to Mayo Clinic for a transplant evaluation to consider paired donation. This is an option that, in many cases, can benefit patients and also the donors.