At Stanford Health Care, our medical teams strive to deliver the finest care possible and pioneer new treatments. This leads to medical innovation across a broad range of conditions, from developing new protocols for kidney transplants, to preventing kidney stones. It all adds up to high-quality personalized care, regardless of your current state of health.

Less medication for healthier lives

Patients who undergo a kidney transplant must take immune-suppressing medications to prevent their bodies from rejecting their new organ. These drugs place patients at increased risk of cancer, infection, and heart disease – and they often fail to prevent organ rejection. Kidney transplant specialists at Stanford have developed a new transplant protocol that spares patients a lifetime of taking immune-suppressant medication.

Called tolerance induction, Stanford doctors help kidney transplant recipients’ bodies accept their new organ using a combination of carefully targeted radiation and stem cells drawn from the donor’s blood. When used in transplants between closely matched family members, tolerance induction decreases or eliminates the need for patients to take anti-rejection medication and significantly decreases rates of organ rejection. Stanford doctors are now working to refine this protocol for use in patients who have a less closely matched donor. Stanford is the only center in the western United States to perform this type of kidney transplant.