TRANSPLANT HOPE: NEW TECH TO ASSESS VIABILITY OF DONOR KIDNEYS

Around 70,000 people are living with kidney failure (End Stage Renal Failure or ESRF) in the UK and are dialysis dependent until they receive a transplant – but only about half will.[1] There is an ongoing challenge in transplant medicine: thousands of potentially life-saving organs are discarded. One in five donor kidneys never reaches a patient.[2] For kidneys from older donors or those with underlying health conditions, that figure goes up (global data suggests up to half of these kidneys are discarded).[3]

               “The decision to transplant an organ or to discard it is one of the hardest a surgeon can make,” explains Professor Vassilios Papalois, a consultant transplant and general surgeon at Imperial College, London, “We are seeing globally there are increasing number of kidneys from older donors (60+) or people with co-morbidities, but as transplant surgeons there is still a degree of caution about will the kidney work effectively, which is why – sadly – so many organs continue to be discarded.”

A new transplant viability assessment technology, which uses a panel of functional and metabolic biomarkers monitored in real-time, could revolutionise how transplant surgeons make decisions giving them confidence to utilise more donor organs than ever before. New research presented today at the European Society of Organ Transplantation (ESOT) 2025 showed that the innovative new in-vitro diagnostic technology was able to measure ‘creatinine clearance’ (this important function is how healthy kidneys clear waste from the body) from machine perfused organs.

“In our study we had injured and uninjured kidneys to see how accurately the RenoSure device could measure the capabilities of the organs,” explains Dr Robert Learney, a qualified medical doctor (who trained at Oxford University and Imperial College London) and CEO and co-founder of Accunea Ltd. who are developing the breakthrough in-vitro diagnostic device, “There were obvious differences in creatinine clearance between the injured and uninjured kidneys, with the uninjured organ demonstrating dynamic changes in creatinine levels reflecting filtration function.”

The RenoSure device, which is connected to the kidney (after the organ is removed from the donor) measures the dynamic responses of the kidneys in real time in a special perfusion machine using micro-dialysis techniques. The new study demonstrates how this groundbreaking technology sheds light on pre-operative organ viability. In a field dominated by uncertainty, RenoSure may offer clinicians the confidence to save organs — and lives.

[1] https://ckdexplained.co.uk/how-many-people-are-on-dialysis-in-uk/?form=MG0AV3&form=MG0AV3

[2] OPTN/SRTR 2022 Annual Data Report: Kidney - PubMed

[3] Epidemiology of Kidney Discard from Expanded Criteria Donors Undergoing Donation after Circulatory Death - PMC