In a breakthrough medical procedure, surgeons at two hospitals in San Francisco, the UCSF and California Pacific Medical Center, performed 18 surgeries in a 9-way kidney transplant in a record 36 hours.

The kidney transplant chain surgeries were completed on Friday afternoon. The transplant surgeons at both the hospitals had successfully completed 10 surgeries involving five recipients and five donors on Thursday and the rest four recipient and four donor swaps involving eight surgeries was completed on Friday.

The incredible feat has been hailed as the longest chain of kidney transplant operations performed in San Francisco in such a short space of time.

Moreover, this kidney transplant procedure deserves to be applauded for coping with time constraints even when the kidneys had to be ferried between the two hospitals, involving four round trips of 3 miles each in a special organ transport service between the California Pacific Medical Center and the UCSF.

The swap transplant procedures have been made possible by a computer program that connects compatible patients with willing donors. So, a recipient who has family members or friends willing to donate but are incompatible can still receive a kidney from another recipient’s compatible donor registered in the chain.

However, the success of this swap transplant rests on an altruistic donor who initiates the chain. In the California Pacific-UCSF kidney swap, it was 56-year-old Reid Moran Haywood who made the first move.

The transplant chain marks a significant milestone as the US alone has over 101,000 people waiting for a kidney donor.