Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
HOLLADAY — A total of 580 organ transplant operations, performed using donated organs from deceased donors, gave hundreds of Utahns a new lease on life in 2023.
However, according to experts in the field, the demand for organ transplantation is increasing as organ donation rates are now significantly outpacing the number of transplants being done every year.
The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network hosted a first-of-its-kind leadership conference at the Cottonwood Country Club in Holladay on Friday as part of an effort with Utah-based DonorConnect, called the Transplant Growth Collaboration. The purpose was to highlight the successes of local programs and discuss how those could be emulated across the entire network in the Intermountain West, and supercharge the rate of successful transplantations performed annually.
"Every year, transplant rates lag behind donation rates and we create a bigger non-use rate — there's a lot of patients who could use the organs we aren't using and we need to figure out a path forward to change that. That's why we are here today," said Dr. Dianne LaPointe Rudow, who serves as the board president of Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, a public-private partnership that links professionals involved in organ donation and transplantation throughout the U.S.
An estimated 8,000 healthy organs go without being transplanted every year — for various reasons, Rudow said. Organ donation is becoming increasingly normalized and there have been advancements in technology, including sophisticated organ pumps that keep donated organs viable for longer and under specialized storage conditions.
To reduce the amount of donated organs that go without being transplanted annually, the transplantation network formed the OPTN Expeditious Task Force to improve the overall efficacy of the organ donation system.
Rudow explained that the primary goal of the task force is to facilitate 60,000 adult and pediatric transplantations, using organs from deceased donors each year, by 2026. It's a move, she says, will require the concentrated efforts of transplant programs across the country and won't be achieved by accident.
"The truth is that the collaboration between all of us is what will drive the shared success of achieving this goal," she said, referring to health care professionals gathered Friday, including representatives from Intermountain Health, University of Utah, Primary Children's Hospital and DonorConnect.
A significant theme during the daylong conference was the importance of teaching transplant programs to learn from the most successful programs in the nation to increase the number of transplants and achieve the collective goal by 2026.
Two organ transplant programs based in Utah were among the celebrated examples of programs experiencing significant growth in recent years. The University of Utah's lung transplant program grew by 82% from 2018 to 2023, going from performing 17 lung transplants in 2018, to 31 in 2023.
Representatives from the U.'s program shared their strategies.
"If you think small, you stay small," said Dr. Sanjeev Raman, an associate professor of medicine in the U.'s pulmonary division and a transplant pulmonologist. He spoke about how the lung transplant program at the U. had to shy away from risk aversion to perform as many successful transplants as possible.
Representatives from Intermountain Health's liver transplant program were celebrated for the growth achieved in the past five years. The program went from performing 38 liver transplants in 2018, to 166 liver transplants in 2023 — which is a whopping 337% increase in a five-year period.
"The mantra of the team became, 'If we're not going to do it, then who is going to do it?'" said Dr. Jean Botha, program director and surgical director of abdominal transplant services at Intermountain Health. He largely credits the rigor and passion of his team for increasing the liver transplantation rate by such a large margin.
CORRECTION: A previous version stated the approximate number of donated organs that went without being transplanted last year as 80,000; the correct number is approximately 8,000.
