M. Utku Unver, PhD, an economist at Boston College who helped develop the optimization model used in the transplant series and is a co-author of the New England Journal of Medicine report, said reports on these transplant chains have led more people to come forward who are willing to donate to a stranger. “I think that people realized that in the past one person could help only one person, but now one person can initiate the chain and this chain can help potentially many, many people.”

And surgical advances are making kidney donation a much less arduous process, Dr. Montgomery noted; minimally invasive techniques allow donors to leave the hospital within 48 hours.

Right now it’s tough to get statistics on just how many NEAD-chain donations have taken place, because there are three regional registries of paired donors but no national system. Creating such a system would be a key step to realizing the potential of the technique, Dr. Montgomery said.

“What we would really like to see, at least the folks at Hopkins, would be to have this done at a national level in a much more thoughtful, organized, rational way,” he says. “But until then we’ll continue to do what we’re doing, which is to try to get as many people transplanted as possible.”

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