STATEMENT
Contact Information:
Jenny Daigle | jdaigle@aopo.org

The Association of Organ Procurement Organizations Applauds New ARPA-H Project to Address Nonuse of Donor Kidneys

McLean, VA (Sept. 26, 2024)—The Association of Organ Procurement Organizations (AOPO) applauds the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), for its significant investment in addressing the rising crisis of organ nonuse, a move which promises to save countless lives.

ARPA-H announced on September 24, 2024 it will invest $44 million into a new project to rehabilitate donor kidneys that are at high risk of not being transplanted, called “No Kidney Left Behind.” The agency awarded this funding to a public benefit corporation, 34Lives, which is housed within the Purdue Research Foundation in West Lafayette, Indiana and funded in part by the National Kidney Foundation.

Over the course of five years, 34Lives – in collaboration with organ procurement organizations (OPOs) – aims to develop new processes for recovering 50% of kidneys with viability concerns and rehabilitate them using Normothermic Machine Perfusion (NMP) technology. The goal of this program is to repair medically complex kidneys or kidneys injured due to prolonged lack of oxygenation, returning them to donated organ supply. This will significantly increase the number of organs available for transplant that would otherwise not be used.

The announcement highlights the ongoing, escalating crisis of organ nonuse, which has emerged as the fastest way to save more lives through organ donation if solved. Last year, more than 3,800 Americans died waiting for kidney transplants, even though the nation’s OPOs recovered more than double the number of organs that may have saved them. Those kidneys – 8,500 in total – were offered by OPOs to patients on the wait list but ultimately were not transplanted.

In 2023, OPOs began organizing a series of “Transplant Growth Collaborations” bringing together donation and transplant leaders in the nation to share scalable strategies for accepting more organs and saving more lives. This collaborative series is done in partnership with the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network’s (OPTN’s) Expeditious Task Force, a group that was formed in September 2023 to study and make recommendations on ways to increase the number of donated organs used for transplant and increase the efficiency of the organ placement process.

Additionally, AOPO has continuously raised the issue of organ non-use as a national crisis and called on Congress and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to address it. The non-use of organs is a secondary loss for donor families, as OPOs recover precious organs from their loved one, only to inform the grieving family that the donated organs were not accepted for transplant.

AOPO applauds HHS and ARPA-H for this much-needed intervention to ensure the decisions of organ donors are honored and the lives of patients on the waitlist are saved.