Area's first-ever four-way kidney transplants a success

[Foxy Brown]

Pierre Kattar Jr. could not donate a kidney to his father because of incompatibility, so he gave one to Niral Patel, whose mother had wanted to give him a kidney but could not. Instead, Patel's mother gave her kidney to Alice Smith.

So it went last Thursday at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where four kidney donors and four kidney recipients gathered for a rare set of operations known as a domino paired exchange, the largest ever performed in the region. Doctors announced the surgeries' success Tuesday.

Such arrangements are becoming more common as doctors seek creative ways to get kidneys to people who need them. Saturday, surgeons at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore performed a six-way paired exchange, the largest ever done.