Technical and immunological challenges in early kidney regrafting

Few reports concerning early organ regrafting are available in the literature, and those dedicated to kidney regrafting do not focus on allocation policies or retrieval surgical strategies. This report describes an unsuccessful living donor kidney transplant, where a 12-year-old female recipient who had received a kidney from her mother died on postoperative day 2 due to cerebral ischemia and became a brain-dead donor. The family agreed to a multiorgan donation since the previously transplanted kidney was highly performing. The organ had initially been allocated according to the blood group of the recipient (AB), although the donor’s (her mother) blood group was B; however, human leukocyte antigen matching was performed considering the donor’s human leukocyte antigen typing. The new recipient of the kidney was a 53-year-old man. Organ procurement was performed with adjunctive cannulation of the iliac vessels, to flush the transplanted kidney with preservation solution; the graft was then procured, including the previous vascular anastomoses. Implantation of the graft was performed on the iliac vessels of the recipient, which were anastomosed to the iliac vessels of the donor, leaving the previous vascular anastomoses untouched. Two years after the transplant, the patient is alive with a functioning graft. Early kidney regrafting is a safeand feasible procedure, on both the surgical and immunological sides. Although kidney recipients who experience brain death in the early postoperative period are few, they should be considered as viable organ donors. Also, allocating and retrieving such organs require few precautions compared with standard allocation and retrieval processes.