Paired for life: Five Minnesota kidney donors and recipients meet in rare reunion

It would be hard for anyone to top the gift that 5-year-old Charlie Benda received just before his birthday this year. The gift – a new kidney – was given to Charlie by a young donor as part of a paired exchange kidney transplant that took place at our hospitals in March.

On May 19, Charlie and his parents finally got to meet their donor, 28-year-old Fernando Cornejo, at LifeSource in Minneapolis during a rare and emotional reunion between five separate organ donors and recipients who all made the transplant possible.

Paired exchange kidney transplants are complex arrangements that help people in need of a new kidney find matching donors more easily. A paired exchange allows a recipient with a willing but incompatible donor – like a spouse or sibling – to match up with another donor-recipient pair in the same situation. After two pairs are matched with each other, they “swap” kidneys, with each donor giving to the recipient in the other pair.

Paired exchange kidney transplants are relatively uncommon, but another factor made this case even more unusual: All the completed transplants were completed using a new technology called eplet matching. Eplet matching involves a complex molecular review that is more sophisticated than traditional methods. Doctors believe it will improve long-term outcomes and reduce the amount of anti-rejection medicine that transplant recipients need.

M Health Fairview leads the country in the number of paired exchange transplants completed using this new molecular-level matching technology, according to Transplant Surgeon Raja Kandaswamy, MD, MBA, surgical director of kidney transplantation and a faculty member at University of Minnesota Medical School.