Twenty years in the making: tolerance in a living-related kidney transplant recipient

Kidney transplant recipients require lifelong immunosuppression to prevent graft rejection. However, immunosuppression is associated with adverse effects. A minority of kidney transplant recipients can be weaned off immunosuppression and maintain their graft function, a situation referred to as “functional or operational tolerance”. We describe a case of a 70-year-old man who received a haploidentical hematopoietic cell transplant for lymphoma 22 years before receiving a kidney transplant from the same donor and was weaned off all immunosuppression by four months post-transplant. Tolerance was present, and there has been no graft rejection or graft vs. host disease. This case demonstrates successful long-term hematopoietic chimerism and functional tolerance after receiving a kidney transplant from the same donor.