Advances in Care

The Matchmaker: Creating New Pathways for Kidney Transplantation

Episode 10
The Matchmaker: Creating New Pathways for Kidney Transplantation
The Matchmaker: Creating New Pathways for Kidney Transplantation

Dr. Sandip Kapur, Chief of Transplant Surgery and Director of the Kidney and Pancreas Transplant Programs at NewYork-Presbyterian, tells the story of how Weill Cornell Medicine became one of the top kidney transplantation programs in the nation. With their creative, multidisciplinary approach, Dr. Kapur and the transplantation team are able to perform surgeries involving complex, high-risk cases that other centers can’t, so they can get more kidneys to the people who need them.

In the United States today, there are over 110,000 people waiting for an organ transplant. And, Dr. Sandip Kapur says, 92% of those patients are waiting for a kidney. In this episode, Dr. Kapur describes a simple philosophy that helped guide Weill Cornell Medicine into one of the top kidney transplantation centers in the nation: offer the maximum amount of opportunities to transplantation that could exist. That means working with multidisciplinary teams to innovate every step of the kidney transplantation process– from making donor surgeries minimally invasive, to matching donors and recipients in new ways through the National Kidney Registry, and even pioneering research into immunotherapy, to improve success rates and patients’ quality of life post-surgery.