Jose Velez, seated, with, from left, transplant team members Sander S. Florman, MD; Shirish S. Huprikar, MD, Chief Medical Offi cer, The Mount Sinai Hospital; Vikram Wadhera, MBBS, Assistant Professor of Surgery (Kidney/Pancreas Transplantation); Brandy Haydel, Clinical Research Program Director; and Meenakshi M. Rana, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases).
In June, Jose Velez became the 50th person at the Mount Sinai Health System’s Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute to receive a transplant under the HIV Organ Policy Equity (HOPE) Act, which allows organs from HIV-positive donors to be transplanted into HIV-positive recipients with end-stage disease, thus increasing the organ donor pool. Prior to the HOPE Act, which went into effect in late 2015, all patients—those with and without HIV—were required to use organs from HIV-uninfected donors.
During the nine years that Mr. Velez waited for a kidney transplant, he was notified four times that a kidney might be available only to be told that it had gone to someone else on the waiting list. “I would tell anyone who is eligible to be in the HOPE program that they should do it,” he says.
Before surgery, he was dependent on dialysis several times a week and could not travel freely or participate in activities that conflicted with such a constricted schedule. Now Mr. Velez’s plans include buying season tickets to the opera and traveling to Abu Dhabi, London, and Paris. “It’s a whole new world, a very different life than I was living for nine years,” he says. “I’m open to so many things now.” He credits Mount Sinai for providing a “safe, secure, and caring” environment. “Sometimes they make you feel as though you’re their only patient,” he says.
Mount Sinai was the first hospital in New York State and the second in the nation to perform a HOPE transplant in 2016. Today, Mount Sinai performs more of these transplants than any other U.S. hospital.
“Thanks to tremendous advances in antiviral therapies, patients with HIV now live long lives and may suffer from end-stage liver and kidney diseases that can be treated by transplantation,” says Sander S. Florman, MD, Director of the Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute at The Mount Sinai Hospital. “Carefully selected people with HIV can have comparable outcomes with transplantation as people without HIV and deserve an equitable opportunity to get a transplant. This has increased the availability of organs for these patients, and has allowed people with HIV to be donors and offer the gift of life to others.”