World’s First Living Donor HIV-to-HIV Kidney Transplant Delivers Hope

March 28, 2019

(UPI) – The world’s first kidney transplantation from a person living with HIV to a recipient also living with HIV took place on Monday. Surgeons at Johns Hopkins Medicine performed the procedure on Nina Martinez, a 35-year-old woman living with HIV, who donated her kidney to an unnamed recipient. “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,” Dorry Segev, professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a news release.