Right now, over 100,000 people nationwide are on the organ transplant list. February 14th is National Organ Donor Day, and The Center for Organ Recovery and Education (CORE) is spreading the word about organ donation.
CORE’s service area spans Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Chemung County, New York. The non-profit prioritizes compassion and integrity in their work, making sure that donors are honored and patients on the transplant list get the care they need.
“[Donors and donor families] are the heart and foundation of our mission,” CORE’s website reads. “Without them, transplantation would not be possible.”
“Our mission at CORE is to save and heal lives through donation,” CORE Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Coordinator AJ Gardner said. “ Our vision is that every potential donor will make a pledge for life.”
The non-profit has a set of values that they follow. The values are compassion, education, innovation, integrity, quality, respect, and responsiveness.
CORE acts as a procurement service for organ donation, and helps to spread the word about it and get people signed up. It’s recommended that people who are interested in being donors register, even if they are unsure if they qualify. You do not have to be young to be a donor either.
“Doctors will know what your wish was, no matter if you can be a donor or not, but I will say age really isn’t a factor,” Gardner said. “The oldest organ donor was 98, and the oldest in our service area was 95. If a person is healthy and if they meet the right criteria, somebody can go on to be an organ donor.”
One single donor can save up to 8 lives, and heal 75 others.
Thanks to recent studies, people who are HIV-positive are also able to be organ donors. The HIV Organ Policy Equity (HOPE) Act, enacted in 2013, allows research to be conducted on the transplantation of organs from donors who are HIV-positive into people who are also HIV-positive prior to receiving the organ. In 2016, the first HIV-positive to HIV-positive donation took place.
“It’s the pursuit of every donor every time with compassion and respect,” Jared Bedekovich, PR/Communications for CORE, said. “We’re opening up more avenues for people to be donors since the list is so long, so if an HIV-positive person is allowed to take an HIV-positive organ, that’s one more person off the transplant list that now opens up another possible organ donation from someone else.”
In November of 2024, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a final rule for donations of kidneys and livers between HIV-positive patients. This new rule, which took effect on November 27, 2024, allows kidney and liver donations between these patients to happen without prior approval from the clinical research and institutional review board. This is a result of research showing that these transplants are both safe and effective.
Some of the research was done here in Pittsburgh. The University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and UPMC collaborated on a trial in which 5 HIV-positive patients received kidney transplants from deceased donors who also had HIV. The results of this trial, called the HOPE trial, proved these transplants to be safe and effective.
Dr. Ghady Haidar, associate professor in Pitt’s Division of Infectious Diseases and UPMC physician, worked on the trial.
“There’s a lot of people in the U.S. who need organ transplants, and kidney and liver transplants being much more common than heart and lung,” Dr. Haidar said. “But there’s people who have end-stage organ disease and are waiting for these transplants, but many of them die on the transplant waiting list because they don’t get an organ available in time.”
He shared that he was drawn to the trial because it’s important work, and it had potential to change medical policy, which it ended up doing.
The team went in with several research questions about things like quality of organs, risk of infection, and more. Dr. Haidar shares that everything was essentially as expected, and the transplants proved to be safe and effective.
“The HOPE Act has brought a lot of autonomy to HIV-positive populations, and has allowed them to make more decisions about their health and what they want to do with their bodies after death,” Gardner said. “I think that’s important, especially in the queer community. A lot of times we don’t have a lot of control about what happens to our bodies, so I think that the HOPE Act really creates that.”
There are still changes being made to allow more people to be donors.
“There was a MSM (men who have sex with men) provision, which means that they were banned from donating tissue for a long time,” Gardner said. “Now, finally, there is a draft that is receiving public comments that will remove that provision entirely.”
Even if you are unsure if you qualify as an organ donor, it is recommended to sign up just in case. You can register to be an organ donor at RegisterMe.org/Pride.
