In November 2022, more than 100,000 Americans were on the organ transplant list eagerly awaiting an organ. But with the United States having just only approximately 20,000 organ donors, a large portion of people on the organ transplant list have to wait for months or even years.
Still, the National Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network notes that 2022 was a record year for organ transplants in America, with the number of transplants increasing by 3.7% to 42,887 transplants.
Despite last year’s performance, the transplant medicine field is still grappling with major issues that are preventing it from functioning at peak efficiency. The shortage of organs is one of the primary problems facing transplant medicine, with hundreds of thousands of Americans currently waiting for an organ and an average of 20 dying every day while still on the waitlist.
The COVID-19 pandemic also dealt the field a significant blow, according to Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai associate professor of medicine Sarah Taimur, MD. During a recent interview, the associate professor noted that there was a decline in organ transplant numbers during the pandemic but that transplant numbers are now at “prepandemic levels.”
During the peak of the pandemic, there was an almost total cessation of living donor transplants, with the number of kidney transplants reducing by more than 90% over a two-week period in March 2020, just a few months after the COVID virus was first discovered in Wuhan, China. Throughout the entirety of 2020, there was a 16% worldwide reduction in transplant activity, with living donor programs and kidney transplants taking the brunt of these reductions.
Even now that we are through the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, Michael G. Ison, MD, MS, chief of the NIH Respiratory Diseases Branch, says the virus itself is one of the key issues affecting transplant medicine. Since organ transplant recipients have a much higher risk of developing severe COVID-19 because they have to be on immunosuppressants, they often receive priority when it comes to coronavirus vaccine guidance and further booster shots. This is especially important as organ transplant recipients are more likely to exhibit a suboptimal immune response after receiving COVID-19 vaccines, which can make them less effective.
Ison, who previously worked at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine as a medical professor of infectious diseases and organ transplantation surgery, says such strategies may be necessary to boost the immune response to vaccines, but researchers still haven’t found a “magic bullet.”
The challenges standing in the way of successful transplant medicine could be partially alleviated by the advances made in immunotherapy by entities such as BiondVax Pharmaceuticals Ltd. (NASDAQ: BVXV), since such breakthroughs may increase the success rates patients experience when they receive donor organs.
NOTE TO INVESTORS: The latest news and updates relating to BiondVax Pharmaceuticals Ltd. (NASDAQ: BVXV) are available in the company’s newsroom at https://ibn.fm/BVXV
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