Surgical teams at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, INTEGRIS Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City and Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit successfully completed the first eight-way, multihospital, domino kidney transplant. The transplant involved eight donors - three men and five women along with eight organ recipients - three men and five women. The transplants are believed to be the largest series of paired kidney donation procedures in the world.
 
The transplants took place over the course of several days and the procedure will now become a model for a national paired kidney donation program, which could result in approximately 1,500 more transplants per year.

This article originally appeared in the August 2009 issue of Kidney Transplant Today.