Today the National Kidney Registry (NKR) announced that Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago has become an NKR Member Center. The NKR now has 104 Member Centers spanning 35 states and the District of Columbia.
The NKR is the world’s largest paired exchange program, facilitating over 1,500 transplants annually for patients who are seeking a better-matched donor and a better transplant outcome. The NKR now facilitates 25% of all living donor kidney transplants in the United States.
The NKR recently presented the Terasaki Medical Innovation Award to Dr. Joe Leventhal, who is the Surgical Director of the Kidney Transplant Program at Northwestern University.
Dr. Leventhal is a pioneer in the development of cell-based therapies to achieve tolerance induction in solid organ transplant recipients, allowing transplant patients to eliminate the need for immunosuppressive medications. He has personally completed the most successful unrelated kidney transplant tolerance cases in the world.
“I am very excited to be working with the NKR,” said Dr. Leventhal in accepting the award, “building upon the work that we’ve done over the last two decades to bring tolerance to kidney transplant recipients from the bench to the bedside in the very near future.”
“We are so pleased to welcome Northwestern into the NKR family,” said Garet Hil, Founder and CEO of the National Kidney Registry. “Dr. Leventhal has made remarkable progress in the fields of transplantation and immune tolerance, and we look forward to supporting him and the Northwestern team in helping improve the lives of transplant patients nationwide.”
For a list of the National Kidney Registry Member Centers, click here.
About the National Kidney Registry
The National Kidney Registry (www.kidneyregistry.com) is an organization whose mission is to save and improve the lives of people facing kidney failure by increasing the quality, speed, and number of living donor transplants while protecting all living donors.
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