Péter Biró, Flip Klijn, Xenia Klimentova and Ana Viana

Paired kidney transplant is a strategy employed when a patient needs a kidney but can find no compatible donors among their family and friends. In such cases, one possible solution is to enroll in a registry of incompatible pairs, in the hope that a match can be found among all the pairs in the donor/recipient pool.

As such, paired kidney transplant programs use methods to allocate compatible organs from donors who are unknown to the recipient. But how can patients be encouraged to bring with them the greatest possible number of potential donors? This was the challenge taken up by the team distinguished with the award for best applied contribution in operations research: Flip Klijn, Scientific Director of the Institute for Economic Analysis, CSIC, and Research Professor at the Barcelona School of Economics, and his colleagues Péter Biró, Senior Researcher at the Centre for Economic and Regional Studies HUN-REN and Associate Professor at the Corvinus University of Budapest (Hungary); Xenia Klimentova, Senior Researcher at the Centre for Enterprise Systems Engineering of the Institute of Engineering, Technology and Systems and Computer Science, INESC TEC Porto (Portugal); and Ana Viana, Coordinating Professor in the School of Engineering of the Polytechnic of Porto and Senior Researcher in the Centre for Industrial Engineering and Management of the Institute of Engineering, Technology and Systems and Computer Science, INESC TEC Porto (Portugal).

In their paper “Shapley-Scarf housing markets: Respecting improvement, integer programming, and kidney exchange,” published in Mathematics of Operations Research, the award-winning team tested the effectiveness of a novel game-theoretical strategy that incentivizes each patient to bring more than one donor to the paired kidney exchange program.

The algorithm they designed prioritizes recipients who recruit more potential donors to the program. “The greater the number and quality of the donors you sign up, the better your chance of getting the compatible kidney you need,” explains Klijn. “This is important because it motivates patients to seek out the best donors, which not only benefits others but also improves their own chances of receiving a good kidney, ensuring the program works better for everyone.” The awardee researchers believe their technique may serve to expand the scope and effectiveness of international paired kidney transplant programs.

Péter Biró, Xenia Klimentova and Ana Viana photos: provided.