MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — WVU Medicine and the WVU Medicine Transplant Alliance successfully performed the first-ever living donor kidney transplant in the hospital system recently.
Dr. Rajeev Sharma, transplant program surgical director and lead surgeon said other transplant programs in the state offer the option, but few physicians in those programs are qualified to perform the procedure as Sharma is.
“Laparoscopic donor nephrectomy is a surgical skill that not every transplant surgeon has,” Dr. Rajeev Sharma. transplant surgical director, said. “It is something that people are trained in but trained enough while in school to go out and do this procedure as an independent surgeon.”
The typical wait time for a deceased kidney donation is about 36 months. There can be many ups and downs during the three-year time window, which can include cancellation and restarting the process. The living donor transplant procedure option removes many of those variables and streamlines the process.
Erika Reid began suffering kidney problems in 2021 and by 2023 she found a potential donor in a childhood friend she had lost contact with who was now a secretary at her daughter’s school. Karen Orndorff responded to a Facebook post from Reid asking for people to be tested to see if they were a match and the rest is history. The living kidney transplant was successfully conducted on July 30.
“With living donors, that waiting time is removed from the picture,” Sharma said. “Now, it is an elective procedure we can perform without having to wait for an appropriate organ to come or the recipient.”
Most transplant programs across the country have strict guidelines that, in some cases, don’t apply in West Virginia. Sharma said the Body Mass Index (BMI) requirement of 40 was dropped shortly after he joined the program last year. Sharma said the change is to get more West Virginians the critical advanced care they need to improve their lives.
“After I joined the program I removed the BMI cutoff,” Sharma said. “Now we approach patients on a case-by-case basis, but moving the cutoff doesn’t mean everybody with a BMI of over 40 will get a transplant.”
Sharma said the next group they are working to help are those with HIV. The program is collecting data with the goal of soon offering lifesaving surgery to those suffering from the virus.
“We have started an HIV transplant program,” Sharma said. “We have not performed the first HIV transplant yet, but we will. We started the process of evaluating patients for that.”
The program was established at WVU to allow this type of critical care to be offered closer to home. Sharma said the residents of the state have responded as these new procedures are introduced and people begin to understand how they can help improve their lives.
“We have started getting enormous referrals now that people across the state know we are offering all these innovative things that will help the patients that were not previously referred for transplant because they did not meet the criteria,” Sharma said.