In technical and therefore aseptic terms they are called crossed or cross-over transplants. Two distant countries, Italy and Portugal, two sick people waiting for a kidney but the one offered by a relative with infinite generosity is not compatible. All seems lost, but no: the data of both are entered into a large network with the details of thousands of people and clicks, a beep reveals that “match found” which means hope, life, starting to dream again and making plans and think about a future.
This story connects Vicenza, the San Bortolo hospital, and the Portuguese city of Porto, with the Centro Hospitalar e Universitàrio: it is the fifth international exchange of organs that Italy carries out with foreign countries, the first 4 all with Spain, and the first with Portugal. The frenzy of that click drives preparations and July 22 is the date of multiple explants and transplants from one cao to another in the Mediterranean.
Francesco Fiore multitransplanted and champion: “I dedicate this victory to my donor” by Maria Teresa Bradascio 07 June 2023 In Italy, a 45-year-old woman, operated on at the Kidney Transplant Center of the Vicenza hospital directed by Dr Fiorella Gastaldon, must receive the kidney. Her donor, a family member, a 53-year-old man, was immunologically incompatible. The couple from Vicenza were therefore enrolled in the KEP-SAT (Kidney Exchange Program – South Transplant Alliance), the international cross-over transplant program that unites Italy, Spain and Portugal, and at a certain point the matching algorithm identified Porto a couple with whom there was mutual compatibility. Chain kidney transplants: triple donation between Padua, Barcelona and Bilbao 05 July 2023
Thanks to a complex work of intervention planning and logistics, managed by the National Transplant Center, the Veneto Regional Transplant Center and the Portuguese institutions, the kidney of the Italian donor was removed in Vicenza and transplanted in Porto in a 41-year-old man while the Italian patient was transplanted with a kidney donated by a 36-year-old woman. The organs were harvested in the two centers simultaneously on the morning of 20 July. The Portuguese kidney arrived at Treviso airport at 2.10 pm on board a Lusitanian Air Force flight: the military delivered the organ to the regional transplant coordinator of the Veneto, Dr. Giuseppe Feltrin, receiving the Italian kidney in exchange. The 118 of Vicenza immediately transported the organ to San Bortolo where the transplantation began immediately. Both surgeries were successful and all recipients and donors went home in excellent condition.
82 cross-over transplants
“With the Vicenza intervention, 82 kidney transplants have already been carried out in Italy in recent years thanks to ‘cross-over’ exchanges between incompatible couples, both thanks to national and international exchanges”, explains the director of the National Transplant Center, Massimo Cardillo. “In the first seven months of 2023 we have already equaled the number of transplants of 2022, a good 9, and the chains involved 7 hospitals: Pisa, Novara, Parma, Roma Gemelli, Roma Tor Vergata and Padova, as well as Vicenza. These are numbers that demonstrate the success of a program that allows hope to be given to patients with very difficult transplantability, thanks to an important coordination and integration work between different centers that allows to achieve common results for the benefit of those who are still on the waiting list”.
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