BRITAIN’S first three-way series of kidney transplants is planned to take place within weeks. It will involve three donors and three recipients. Each couple will be a husband and wife, parent and child or brother and sister, but the donor will give away one of their organs so that their loved one gets a suitable match from a stranger.

The trio of transplants will take place simultaneously before the end of the year.

The donors cannot give one of their kidneys directly to their relative or friend because they do not have a compatible blood group or tissue type. To get round the problem, the donors “give” one of their kidneys into a pool and doctors match them up with other sets of relatives or friends.

Doctors carried out the matching process last month and identified a group of six people to exchange kidneys. For example, a kidney from the donor of pair one will be given to the patient in pair two.

So far 36 kidney swaps between two couples or sets of relatives or friends have been carried out in

Britain since new legislation in the Human Tissue Act made them legal in 2004. This will be the first three-way kidney swap in this country. It will allow more patients to benefit from a matching kidney.

Keith Rigg, a consultant renal transplant surgeon at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “There are a host of variables, such as blood and tissue type, which mean the chances of finding a match with a relative are no better than about one in four.”

In America and Korea more complicated swaps have taken place. In July, surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, working with four other hospitals, announced they had carried out the first eight-way kidney swap involving 16 patients. It was spread over several days and needed eight anaesthetists, 16 nurses and nine surgeons.

In Britain, surgeons are understood to be nervous about carrying out transplants over several days in case the donor from one pair decides not to give away a kidney or becomes ill after their relative has received an organ from the deal.

The transplants are being organised in secrecy to prevent participants making objections about whom their kidney is coming from or going to. For this reason, the donors and patients will not be identified to each other until after the transplants are complete.

The Human Tissue Authority which regulates transplants and NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT), responsible for matching and allocating donated organs, remain concerned about the logistics and ethics of the scheme but are confident the risks are worth taking.

The participants were selected through the national paired and pooled living kidney matching scheme organised by NHSBT.

They all has been put through medical and psychological tests to ensure they are fit enough to enter the swaps. Checks are also carried out to ensure nobody is coerced into donating.

Intensive planning will be required to ensure surgeons and operating theatres are simultaneously available and that the pairs of

participants do not come into contact ahead of the operation.

The swaps, involving taking kidneys from healthy volunteers, have become necessary due to the shortage of organs donated after death. There are currently more than 7,000 kidney patients on the transplant waiting list and almost 300 died while waiting for an organ last year.

One in three kidneys used in transplants in Britain now come from living donors.

A spokeswoman for NHSBT said: “Living donation and transplantation helps to free hundreds of people every year from kidney dialysis. It is highly successful and is more cost-

effective when compared with the cost of dialysis.

“But if more people would allow their organs to be donated after their death for transplant, fewer living donations would be needed.”

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