First HIV-positive organ transplant in US approved

By Barry Eitel

SAN FRANCISCO

The first-ever organ transplant from a HIV-positive donor in the United States will proceed, the hospital conducting the transplants announced Wednesday.

The procedure will occur at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Maryland but not date has been set.

The institution was approved to execute liver and kidney transplants from HIV-positive donors to HIV-positive recipients, becoming the first and only hospital to conduct such procedures.

Johns Hopkins told the New York Times Wednesday that it had identified and approved suitable organs and patients.

If successful, HIV-positive transplants could help the save the lives of more than 1,000 Americans.

The landmark transplant ends a ban on such procedures that was put into law in 1988 at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

Dr. Dorry Segev, an associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins, spent two helping to draft legislation that eventually became the HIV Organ Policy Equity (HOPE) Act.

The bill signed in 2013 by President Barack Obama, effectively ended decades of rules forbidding medical facility from accepting transplants from HIV-positive donors.

Approximately 122,000 patients are on the organ transplant waiting lists in the U.S. at any one time, with thousands dying annually while waiting for an organ.

Segev estimates that 500 - 600 suitable organs from HIV-positive donors were tossed out every year due to the old restrictions.

“Organ transplantation is actually even more important for patients with HIV, since they die on the waiting list even faster than their HIV-negative counterparts,” Segev said.

“We are very thankful to Congress, Obama and the entire transplant community for letting us use organs from HIV-positive patients to save lives, instead of throwing them away, as we had to do for so many years.”

The Johns Hopkins procedure will be the first in the U.S., but not globally.

In 2010, doctors in South Africa reported on their trials with HIV-positive transplants.

Last year, the doctors claimed the survival rate for the original patients was promising and only slightly lower than transplant patients without HIV.

The World Health Organization estimates 1.5 million victims around the world were killed by AIDS in 2013, with another 35 million living with it.