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Non-use simulation analysis report for kidneys and pancreata now available

Published on: Wednesday, January 15, 2025

In September 2023, the OPTN Board of Directors directed the OPTN Kidney and Pancreas Transplantation Committees to consider how continuous distribution would impact the goals of decreasing non-use and non-utilization of kidneys and pancreata. In response, the Committees submitted a request to the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients (SRTR) to assess the feasibility of modeling the impact of allocation policies on non-use and non-utilization. SRTR presented their findings to the Committees in November 2024, which includes novel metrics for evaluating proposed allocation policies, including assessing a policy’s potential to decrease non-use. This will help the OPTN to develop allocation policies that will provide more transplants to patients in need. Brief highlights of findings for each organ type are outlined below. Read the full report here to see how the SRTR approached this work, and the metrics for which SRTR was able to replicate historic trends.

Kidney

The report identified a collection of submodels that can be used to simulate non-use without any clear deficiencies in other simulated kidney metrics. This collection of simulation submodels will be used in subsequent simulation modeling requests and will allow the Committee to assess the potential impact of different allocation policies on kidney non-use.

Pancreas

All collections of submodels evaluated in this report showed limited ability to replicate historical pancreas data for most research questions. This was true regardless of whether utilization modeling was incorporated into the simulation.

Next steps for Committees

The Kidney Transplantation Committee will work with SRTR and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to evaluate the impact of potential continuous distribution policies on kidney non-use.

The Pancreas Transplantation Committee will pursue alternatives to simulation modeling for evaluating potential continuous distribution policies.

Additional resources