A reliable and safe way of shortening cadaver kidney ischemia time: prenephrectomy tissue typing using donor lymph node cells.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of prenephrectomy donor tissue typing on tissue typing quality and transplantation outcome in human kidney transplantation. We report on 680 consecutive kidney transplantations performed at the Vienna Transplantation Center from 1986 to June 1991. In 343 of them, HLA typing was performed using donor lymph node cells obtained in a small surgical procedure several hours before organ retrieval. The mean cold ischemia time (CIT) could be reduced to 17.7 h in these patients compared with 21.9 h in the control group (n = 337, conventional tissue typing using spleen lymphocytes obtained during the organ removal, P =0.0001). There was a trend towards better initial and long-term function in the lymph node group; however, this did not reach statistical significance. The clarity of tissue typing results was significantly better when lymph nodes were used as the lymphocyte source. We conclude that prenephrectomy tissue typing is a feasable and inexpensive method of shortening CIT in renal transplantation and favors HLA typing, both likely to benefit transplantation outcome particularly within organ exchange programs.