An Algorithm for Kidney Donation Matching
in: Health and Well-Being
In the early 2000s, the NSF funded Alvin Roth, Tayfun Sonmez, and M. Utku Unver in applying economic theory to the problem of kidney donations. At the time, extensive waiting queues prevented tens of thousands of patients from obtaining the new kidneys they needed to survive. Roth and colleagues recognized a similarity between the problem of incombatible donors (when a patient’s immune system is incompatible with a donor’s) to existing theories described by LLoyd Shapley about efficiently matching pairs of people to each other based on their preferences.
This research led to the development of a large-scale kidney donation program, which allows individuals all over the nation to donate to one another in complex exchanges, while simultaneously retaining the incentives that drive people to donate to their relatives in need. Their framework specifically excludes the consideration of monetary incentive, which proved vital given USA laws that forbid the exchange of body parts for money. Their program has since been adopted to enable national kidney exchanges and continues to save lives by shortening kidney donation waiting times. For their work, Alvin Roth and LLoyd Shapley shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics.
- States: MA , PA
- Organizations: Harvard University , University of Pittsburgh , Boston College
- Topics: Biology , Health
- Federal Grants: NSF 9996276 , NSF 8908696 , NSF 9507791
- Links and further reading: [ link1 | link2 | link3 | link4 | link5 ]