Today, the National Kidney Registry (NKR) announced the results of a major upgrade to its matching system that is increasing the number of matches found for kidney transplant patients with incompatible donors.
The software upgrade has extended the NKR’s matching capability from two-deep loops and 12-deep chains to 20-deep loops and 20-deep chains. Early results indicate that this technology advance is not only finding more matches, but is finding more matches for the hardest-to-match patients, including another six antigen match found last month for a patient in the NKR that has a 99.9% PRA with 64 listed antibodies.
Since upgrading the matching software in December 2010, over the past 90 days, the NKR has made 44 match offers involving 277 potential recipients. nine of these match offers were loops and 35 of these match offers were chains. The loop offers involved 28 potential recipients and the chain offers involved 249 potential recipients. The two longest chain offers were 18 deep. During the past 90 days the Registry facilitated 45 successful transplants.
“This latest technology advancement required a near total rewrite of our core matching engine and pushes the computer processing limits of our state-of-the-art platform. It was a massive programming effort that builds on a foundation of over 15,000 development hours already invested in the platform, achieving the anticipated results,” said Rich Marta, Senior Software Engineer at the National Kidney Registry.
“As our capacity to find matches has expanded, we are now seeing an increase in the rate of match offer declines which has inspired another innovation, The Toolbox, which will allow member centers to “preview and pre-select” all potential donors that are biologically compatible to a potential recipient.
This project is partially funded by a $175,000 HRSA grant and is already under development. It is expected to be rolled out in the next two months. It will increase the number of transplants by reducing the number of match offers that are ultimately declined,” reported Garet Hil, Founder and CEO of the National Kidney Registry.
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