The Paired Donation Program - an effort of LDS Hospital's Intermountain Transplant Center, the University of Utah Transplant Center and Intermountain Donor Services - will allow kidney-failure patients who have willing but unsuitable donors to exchange kidneys.

Candace Lindquist, one of the program's first participants, lived with the inevitability of a kidney transplant for nearly two decades. Her sister, Gigi Allred, was on stand-by to donate an organ come that day.

Diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease, the 50-year-old Lindquist had numerous fluid-filled cysts that were gradually replacing the mass of her organs and hampering their function. One kidney had already been removed. In February, the remaining one was taken out, leaving her with no other choice but to go on dialysis.

Finally, Lindquist needed the transplant. But there was a glitch. The sisters, they discovered through tests, weren't a good match. Lindquist has Type B blood; Allred is a Type O.

"I was really devastated," Allred, 53, said. "We had just kind of planned on this for 16 years."

Without the new program, Lindquist's story would have ended like many others: she would have assumed a spot on a long wait list of people needing a healthy organ.

Instead, she was able to quickly get the kidney she needed from a Good Samaritan donor, 23-year-old Brigham Young University student Kristen Bylund.

The donor paired exchange transplant program works like this: A man needs a kidney transplant. His brother is willing to be the donor, but the two have mismatched blood or tissue types. Under LDS Hospital's program, the brother still donates his kidney, but to someone else who is a match.

The man originally in need of a kidney, meanwhile, is bumped to the top of the hospital's wait list, making him eligible to receive the first available matching organ.

Allred - who had intended to donate a kidney to Lindquist, her sister - instead gave it to a 23-year-old Tooele woman diagnosed with glomerulonephritis. The disease makes it difficult for the kidneys to remove waste and excess fluids.

"To say it's a gift is a little bit of an understatement," said the woman, who felt noticeably better just a day after her transplant surgery earlier this month.

Lindquist, meanwhile, received Good Samaritan Bylund's kidney after just five months on dialysis.

LeGrand Belnap, a surgeon and director of LDS Hospital's transplant program, hopes the novel concept will close the widening gap between the number of kidneys available for transplant and the number of people in need of one.

In Utah, 120 people are waiting for a kidney transplant. While about 65 percent of Utahns have registered to be organ donors - among the highest percentages in the country - the kidney shortage remains.

In order for a person to be an organ donor at death, he or she has to die in a hospital on a ventilator. Though 6,000 people die each year in Utah, only 80 meet that criteria.

One of the first hospitals in the Intermountain West to implement such exchange transplants, LDS Hospital is aiming to expand the pool of potential living donors and increase the quality of matches.

Living-donor transplants, where the patient receives a kidney from a live person, provides better organ function than if that kidney were taken from a cadaver, Belnap said. The survival rate among those patients who receive living-donor transplants is about 15 percent higher.

"It makes perfect sense," Belnap said Monday following a press conference at LDS Hospital. "It's something we should have done 10 years ago."

lrosetta@sltrib.com