Solving the organ donation crisis in two parts
Thanks to our generous donors, last year we provided a $94k grant to the 501c3 efforts of Elaine Perlman and her work at Waitlist Zero and the Coalition to Modify NOTA (petition here) as part of her performance in the ACX Grants competition.
Kidney donation an expensive addressable problem that needlessly throws away money and lives - only 10% of worldwide organ transplantation needs are being met - and a patient dies every hour in the US waiting for an organ, yet 80% of transplantable organs are not utilized.
If you are interested in legislation addressing this, you can use our grantee WeVote's tool to get an AI summary and info about the End Kidney Deaths Act and its supporters.
Why this is a big deal? Why is it happening?
Organ donation is not the niche cause you might imagine. From their website
"Living kidney donation is already among the most tightly regulated medical procedures in the country. Only about 2 percent of willing donors are approved and ultimately donate. Individuals with addiction risks, medical instability, or signs of coercion are screened out. The End Kidney Deaths Act does not change these safety rules. It simply removes financial barriers for people who already qualify.
More than 800,000 Americans are living with kidney failure. Twenty-five people die every day waiting for a transplant.
Dialysis costs taxpayers $50 billion each year, about 1 percent of all federal spending."
One of their favored interventions is a ten year pilot program to provide a refundable tax credit of $10,000 per year for five years ($50,000 total) to living kidney donors who donate a kidney to a stranger, which will go to those who have been waiting longest on the kidney waitlist.
They claims this will save up to 100,000 American lives & $40 billion in taxes per year.
But we also need tech to fix it..
While there is work progressing on artificial organs of all kinds, before those can arrive the other major limiter is time. 80% of transplantable organs are left unused!
We introduced Elaine to a promising new scientific innovator at a company called X-therma who has an FDA Breakthrough product that can extend kidney shelf life from 4-8 hours to over 120 hours and dramatically increase both success and access.
We met X-Therma at our grantee Foresight's Vision weekend conferences, where we recently gave a speech in Puerto Rico on why now is the time to utilize philanthropic dollars to fund defensive technologies - and recently toured their manufacturing facility.
X-therma also has another important cold storage product targeted at lower temperatures important for cell tissue and manufacturing, cryonics and cryopreservation. This is a bigger deal than you might think, for a broad variety of applications.
Many other important applications
Coral and Ecosystems Restoration
It's not just other organs that stand to benefit from this. Just as an example – We brought X-Therma to an event of grantee Pati-Mar whom we collaborate with on our Seagrass project to discuss its use in Coral transplantation..
IVF
Another important aspect is the toxicity of current solutions – Consider that the current IVF process and the preservatives used in it are not only responsible for low viability but also it is theorized to do epigenetic damage! This is not something you want to subject your potential future child to if there is another way.
