People from minority communities are more likely to have B type blood and with current low donation rates from these populations, there are simply not enough kidneys to go around. The discovery could be particularly impactful for people from ethnic minority groups who often wait a year longer for a transplant than Caucasian patients. By taking B type human kidneys and pumping the enzyme through the organ using our normothermic prefusion machine, we saw in a matter of just a few hours that we had converted a B type kidney into an O type.” 'After this, we knew that the process is feasible, and we just had to scale up the project to apply the enzyme to full-size human kidneys. “Our confidence was really boosted after we applied the enzyme to a piece of human kidney tissue and saw very quickly that the antigens were removed,' said MacMillan. But changing the blood type to the universal O will allow more transplants to take place as O can be used for people with any blood group. The enzyme acted like “molecular scissors” to remove the blood type markers that line the blood vessels of the kidney resulting in the organ being converted to the most common O type.Ī kidney from someone with an A blood type cannot be transplanted to someone with a B blood type, nor the other way around. Professor Mike Nicholson and PhD student Serena MacMillan used a normothermic perfusion machine – a device which connects with a human kidney to pass oxygenated blood through the organ to better preserve it for future use – to flush blood infused with an enzyme through the deceased kidney. The project, funded by charity Kidney Research UK, could increase the supply of kidneys available for transplant, particularly within ethnic minority groups who are less likely to be a match for the majority of donated kidneys. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have successfully altered the blood type on three deceased donor kidneys in a ground-breaking discovery that could have major implications for kidney patients.

Blood type