Media Release

Udupi, Dec 9: Kasturba Hospital, Manipal has become the first hospital in coastal Karnataka to successfully do a kidney transplant across blood groups. Kidney transplant is generally done only if the receiver and the donor have the same blood group. Kidneys from donors with different blood group is considered incompatible with a high chance of it being rejected. But Kasturba Hospital through a process called plasmapheresis was able to transplant a kidney to a person with one blood group and the donor with another blood group on November 28.

A skilled medical and surgical team of doctors at the hospital performed the operation on a patient who had O positive blood group. His wife was keen to donate her kidney with motivation from their daughter, but she had B positive blood group. There being no voluntary donors available, the transplant was done with the wife’s kidney.

ABO incompatible (different blood group) transplantation is the only options for patients with no compatible donors. Such a transplant is possible only after special treatment which cleans blood group reactants or antibodies. This facility is available only in major cities and comes at a high cost.

The antibodies present in the patient was removed by plasmapheresis under the guidance of Dr Shamee Shastry at the blood bank of Kasturba Hospital. The procedure was performed by a team of doctors including Dr Arun Chawla, Dr Padmaraj Hegde, Dr Joseph Thomas from the department of urology and Dr Ravindra Prabhu, Dr Shankar Prasad, department of nephrology and Dr Anita Shenoy, Dr Amrut Rao and Dr Vamshidhar from the department of anaesthesiology.

Explaining the role of transfusion medicine in patient management, Dr Shamee Shastry, professor and head of the department of immunohematology and blood transfusion said that monitoring of antibody levels was done daily prior to transplantation. To reduce the antibody titers to safe level, three procedures of therapeutic plasma exchange were done prior to the transplantation and two procedures were done post transplantation. Plasma exchange is a procedure used to remove the implicated antibody present in the plasma using an apheresis equipment."

"It is a new chapter in the history of kidney transplant for the Hospital," said Dr (Col) M Dayananda, MS and COO, Kasturba Hospital, Manipal. "The transplanted kidney is working well and the patient has recovered," he added. "The dream of a kidney transplant, regardless of matching blood group and cross matching process has become a reality," he said.