Helping You to Accept Your New Kidney with Desensitization Protocols

By nature, your body doesn't react well when foreign objects are introduced into it. It's safe to say that your body would consider a new kidney – or perhaps more precisely, the antigens associated with that kidney – to be foreign. Your immune system would produce organ-rejecting antibodies that would guarantee transplant failure without a desensitization treatment protocol prior to surgery.

Of the 80,000 or so people on the national transplant waiting list, it's estimated that as many as 30% of them are hyper-sensitive to the markers on the surface of donor kidneys. Stanford Hospital’s Kidney Transplant Program is one of just a handful of medical facilities nationally with a rigorous desensitization program for both deceased and living donor transplantation.