HIV-Positive Kidney Donor Makes History

BALTIMORE, MD — Surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital performed a procedure this week that will go down in the history books and is challenging old notions about human immunodeficiency virus, better known as HIV. The groundbreaking surgery occurred on Monday, March 25, and it involved a kidney transplant from one living person with HIV to another.

Nina Martinez, 35, who works in public health in Atlanta and is an advocate for eliminating the stigma around HIV, said that she hopes her kidney donation will inspire others.

“I don’t want to be anyone’s hero. I want to be someone’s example, someone’s reason to consider donating,” Martinez said in a statement provided by Johns Hopkins Medicine.

There are more than 113,000 individuals currently on transplant lists, and 20 people die daily waiting for an organ. The longest list is for kidneys, officials said.

Martinez had planned to give her kidney to a friend. She began the evaluation process in October 2018 with Johns Hopkins to determine whether she could donate her organ. Her friend died before she was cleared to provide the transplant.

“Despite losing my friend to kidney disease, I wanted to move forward with donation as a way to honor them,” Martinez said. “Some people believe that people living with HIV are ‘sick,’ or look unwell. For me, I knew I was in good health.”

Martinez contracted HIV when she had a blood transfusion as a baby, before hospitals tested for the virus, CNN reported.

The test used by blood banks to screen for HIV was not in place until 1985, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

AIDS, which is caused by HIV, had become the leading cause of death for Americans age 25 to 44 by 1994.

HIV-infected donors were not able to give their organs to HIV-positive patients until 2013, according to Johns Hopkins, whose staff helped draft legislation — called the HOPE (HIV Organ Policy Equity) Act — that made it possible.

Since Johns Hopkins performed the first surgery of that kind in 2016, there have been about 100 such transplants, according to CNN, which reported the organ donations to those with HIV have come from cadavers of those who had HIV.

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Advances in medicine have made it so that those with HIV controlled by antiretroviral drugs can donate a kidney with the same amount of risk that it would pose a person without HIV, according to Hopkins researchers.

The surgery performed this week in Baltimore offers hope for both donors and recipients, doctors say.

“This is the first time someone living with HIV has been allowed to donate a kidney, ever, in the world, and that’s huge,” said Dorry Segev, M.D., Ph.D., professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins surgeon who handled Martinez’s operation.

“A disease that was a death sentence in the 1980s has become one so well-controlled that those living with HIV can now save lives with kidney donation — that’s incredible,” Segev said.

There is “one less stigma associated with the disease,” Segev told CNN, noting that both the recipient and the donor are “doing great.”