Cross-School Columbia Team Wins Award for Kidney Transplant Concept

Lloyd E. Ratner, professor of surgery and director of Renal and Pancreatic Transplantation at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and Eric J. Johnson, Norman Eig Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, were jointly awarded a KidneyX EMPOWER: Living Link Prize for a proposal to increase the number of living kidney donors.

The Columbia team was given the award for “DonorForward,” a proposal that aims to increase the number of kidney donors among people who have expressed interest in donating kidneys to specific individuals, but whose potential recipient received a kidney from another living donor. The proposal aims to encourage those individuals to donate to people that they don’t know.

The Kidney Innovation Accelerator, or KidneyX, is a public-private partnership between the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the American Society of Nephrology. It accelerates innovation in kidney care by funding prize competitions and fostering collaboration across the kidney community to improve outcomes for people with kidney diseases. Nine total winners were selected from 87 proposals. 

More than a dozen Americans die every day while waiting for a kidney, and nearly 100,000 Americans are currently on the waitlist for one. Despite growing need, the number of living kidney donors has remained virtually flat for 20 years.

In 1995, Ratner and Louis R. Kavoussi (CC’79), then colleagues at Johns Hopkins, performed the first minimally invasive live donor nephrectomy operation, which has become the standard of care in the U.S. and throughout the world for the past 20 years. This operation made it easier for people to donate kidneys, with less pain, shorter hospitalization, quicker recuperation, and better cosmetic results. The method revolutionized live kidney donation, and resulted in doubling the number of live donor transplants in the U.S. It also resulted in better donor safety, with donor operative mortality declining from around seven deaths per 10,000 operations to less than one per 10,000.

Johnson, a psychologist by training, had earlier explored the decisions of people to agree to become organ donors upon their death. He is most well known for identifying differences in agreement to become a donor depending upon whether the choice is framed as opt-in or opt-out.

Professors Johnson and Ratner have been collaborating on ways to increase living kidney donations for several years. Their winning proposal stemmed from work they had done trying to identify what motivates “non-directed donors”—people who wish to donate without any particular recipient in mind—to volunteer. They conducted a survey of these donors, and found that two leading motivations were that they had heard of someone who was in need of a transplant (either someone that they knew or a stranger that they learned about through the media); or that they knew someone who had actually donated a kidney. Johnson and Ratner hypothesized that people who came forward to donate to a specific individual, but their donation did not end up being needed, could be allowed to become non-directed donors. Their proposal is to approach members of this group to make them actual donors. A retrospective review of five years of CUIMC data has identified more than 1,400 such potential donors.

The winning proposal will now proceed, with $375,000 in award money. The money will be used to hire personnel to identify the best way to approach possible donors from this group, and hopefully enable them to become actual living kidney donors.

Johnson and Ratner also hope to organize donor drives at, and sponsored by, Columbia, drawing on ideas pioneered by Renewal, a nonprofit group that has had success in identifying new non-directed donors.

The winning teams of the KidneyX Empower Living Link Prize were honored during the Winners Showcase on September 10, 2026. Winners presented their innovative strategies and solutions aimed at expanding living kidney donation, and will receive prize money to encourage further progress on their idea.