April 8, 2019 – HIV-HIV Transplant

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Anchor lead: An historic kidney transplant among two people with HIV has taken place at Johns Hopkins, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Transplanting a kidney from one person with HIV to another who is also infected has just taken place for the first time. Dorry Segev, a transplant surgeon at Johns Hopkins, says just like many others, people with HIV can develop conditions that put them on the transplant list.

Segev:  Having HIV today basically means you have to take a couple pills and your life expectancy is the same as everybody’s else’s life expectancy and the diseases you get are the same that everybody else gets. And so people with HIV are at risk of kidney disease because of hypertension and diabetes and the same reasons that other people get kidney disease. So we’re seeing more and more people with HIV living longer, developing these conditions, and then needing transplants.   :27

Segev notes that both donor and recipient are on antiretroviral therapy that keeps HIV at an undetectable level, so infection risk should be essentially zero, but he acknowledges that since such a transplant hasn’t been done before, close monitoring is planned. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.