Ahmedabad: The National Organ and Tissue Transplantation Authority (NOTTO) has recently announced the constitution of a national swap transplantation expert committee for framing the National Swap Transplantation Guidelines. Two people from the Institute of Kidney Diseases and Research Centre (IKDRC) are part of the 17-member team, including 12 from govt and five from private sector institutions. The move has come after the Supreme Court directives for the same.The members include Dr Vivek Kute, professor and unit head of nephrology, and Dr Divyesh Engineer, professor of nephrology. Dr Kute is also treasurer of Indian Society of Organ Transplantation (ISOT). Dr Kute said that the year 2025 saw the highest number of swap transplants at IKDRC, at 90 out of 502. “Swap transplant in general parlance can be understood as the procedure where the donor matching criteria for the living organ donation might not be the best match for the potential recipient. In such cases, the doctors use different criteria to find the best match and use data for transplant from donor A to patient B and vice versa,” he said. “IKDRC is one of the shining examples of the method’s success, with 646 such procedures in 25 years.” He added that the method can reduce the wait list. According to sources, the state has a waiting list of 1,349 for kidneys. While organ retrieval from cadaver donations fulfils part of the demand, the number is very high and still the mainstay is living donor transplants, they added. Experts at ISOT indicated that it can lead to up to a 25% rise in transplant procedures in India. They added that with the step, there could be a national registry dedicated to swap transplants on the lines of the US and European nations. Dr Manish Balwani, secretary of ISOT and member of the expert committee, said that ISOT has developed a software for the matching of the donors and recipients, which has been given to NOTTO free of cost for the initiative. According to the NOTTO order, the committee will draft and finalise national swap transplantation guidelines, draft and finalise training modules for swap transplant centres and coordinators, draft and finalise proforma for reporting, monitoring and auditing procedures, and review and update guidelines as and when required.
