The applicability of machine perfusion preservation by the Airdrive system in kidney transplantation.

Kidney donor graft shortage for transplantation has led to the use of marginal donors such as non-heart beating donor (NHBD) kidneys. As perfusion in this category of donor patients is absent prior to graft nephrectomy, NHBD kidneys suffer warm ischemia, causing damage, which is associated with early and late graft loss. Preservation of the graft by hypothermic machine perfusion instead of conventional cold static storage provides a viable solution to reduce the warm ischemic damage-induced graft loss. In preclinical animal studies, the Airdrive™ machine perfusion system has shown to be safe, and to improve renal function and graft structural integrity after induced warm ischemic damage. The next step is to introduce the Airdrive™ system in a clinical setting. To this end, a pilot-study using the Airdrive™ system for the preservation of kidney grafts was devised to demonstrate that the machine perfusion system is ‘safe’ for use in the clinical setting. In this pilot-study we hypothesize that the use of the Airdrive™ machine perfusion system is safe and technically feasible for graft preservation in kidney transplantation.

It is safe to use the Airdrive machine perfusion system as a preservation method in kidney transplantation.

Renal function parameters will be routinely checked and are all part of the standard patient care protocol of the AMC hospital.

All seven kidney grafts will be preserved using the Airdrive machine perfusion system between arrival at the AMC and implantation in the recipient instead of continuation of conventional cold storage.