Kidney Transplant

• Kidney Transplant
• Evaluation and Waiting
• Living Donor Transplants
• Recovery and Next Steps
• Surgery

The kidney transplantation programs at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center are the oldest in the region and the largest in the nation. Doctors at the two programs together perform more than 450 kidney transplants each year.

Team Care

Transplant specialists at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell work in cooperation with those at the Rogosin Institute, an independent not-for-profit treatment and research center in New York City, and one of the top comprehensive renal centers in the nation.

The multidisciplinary transplant teams at both NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital kidney transplant programs include:

• surgeons
• nephrologists
• social workers
• financial coordinators
• pathologists
• blood bank and apheresis unit specialists.

Expediting Transplants

Both centers are committed to increasing access to transplantation and returning as many patients as possible to active lives. Doctors here perform living donor transplantation whenever possible so that patients get their new kidney sooner – before their conditions worsen and they must begin dialysis.

The Hospital's renal transplantation programs use a highly effective method of managing the waiting process for patients on the UNOS list for a deceased donor organ. This aggressive, efficient approach ensures that those patients at the top of the list are ready to be transplanted as soon as a kidney is available.

Coordinated Care for Complex Cases

Some patients have other medical conditions and need concurrent care. Our transplant programs offer comprehensive, coordinated medical and surgical care, particularly for:

• Patients with diabetes and end-stage renal disease. These patients may receive pancreatic transplantation, either simultaneously with the kidney or in a separate procedure following kidney transplantation.
• Patients with advanced cardiac or liver disease. These patients may be candidates for combined heart-kidney or liver-kidney transplantation.
• Female kidney transplant recipients. A program with the Hospital's Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology provides specialized care in fertility and pregnancy.
• Patients with skin cancer and other skin diseases. A program within the Hospital's Department of Dermatology specializes in treating transplant patients with these skin diseases.

Trials of most new therapeutic options are available to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital's patients at both programs due to the hospital's high volume and superb academic and research facilities.

Expanding Access

Surgeons at both transplant programs are now safely transplanting kidneys that may not meet the usual criteria for transplantation, but are nevertheless healthy enough for a successful transplant, under expanded criteria protocols. Organs in this category include those from:

• donors who are older
• have hypertension or diabetes
• who died from a stroke
• or who at the time of their death suffered mild kidney injury.

The use of expanded criteria organs is successful, especially among older recipients and those doing poorly on dialysis. It also allows donor organs that might go unused in one region of the country to be matched with appropriate recipients in areas of great demand (such as the New York metropolitan area).

Incompatible Transplant

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital's two transplant programs are among the few institutions worldwide to offer incompatible kidney transplantation, transplantation into recipients whose makeup would normally result in rapid rejection of the graft. This approach is used when a compatible live donor is not available, and requires the latest immunologic strategies to reduce antibody levels in the recipients' blood. Long-term survival among incompatible recipients is similar to that for compatible transplants.