White House announces actions to reduce organ waiting list

The White House and dozens of companies, universities, hospitals, and nonprofits on Monday announced a series of actions aimed at reducing the waiting list for patients waiting for organ transplants.

"Every 10 minutes, someone is added to the waiting list for a life-saving organ transplant in the United States. And every day, 22 people die while waiting," the White House said in a statement.

"Today's announcements represent an essential step toward increasing access to organ transplants and reducing the organ waiting list," it said.

The new actions announced included almost 200 million U.S. dollars in investments to facilitate breakthrough research and development on organ transplants.

Much of the money will come from the U.S. Department of Defense, which announced more than 160 million dollars in public-private investment to launch a new Advanced Tissue Biofabrication Manufacturing Innovation Institute focused on developing next-generation manufacturing techniques to repair and replace cells and tissues that may one day lead to organ replacement.

Some of the actions aimed to increase the number of transplants by almost 2,000 each year and improve outcomes for patients.

For example, more than 30 transplant centers will collaborate to share data for kidney transplants for hard-to-match patients, which has the potential to help almost 1,000 more people a year access transplant.

Also, Johns Hopkins University is working with the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease to launch a multicenter study of HIV-positive to HIV-positive organ transplants, a surgery that was done for the first time in this country at Hopkins in March.

The new steps also aimed to close the gap between the 95 percent of Americans who support organ donation and the roughly 50 percent who are registered organ donors.

More than 20 organizations including Facebook, Google and Twitter have committed to develop new tools and public advocacy campaigns to increase the options and ease of registering to be an organ donor.

Last year, there were more than 30,000 transplants in the United States, representing the most annual transplants ever and the largest year-over-year percentage increase in transplants since 2004, according to the White House.

Despite this progress, there are still more than 120,000 people on the waiting list for an organ in the country, with the vast majority, almost 100,000, waiting for a kidney transplant. Enditem