After Successful Transplant, Patient Returns To His Passion

Jamil Hill received his first kidney transplant in 1993—six years after learning he had a rare kidney disorder called Focal Segmental Glomerulosclerosis, a condition that attacks the kidney’s ability to properly perform its filtering function. 

In 2006, 13 years after transplant, that kidney failed and Hill was put back on the transplant waiting list and began regular dialysis treatments.

Despite the exhaustion of dialysis, Hill stayed active with his passion: work with local at-risk teens through Cincinnati’s Community Action Agency. In addition to training teens at his construction firm each summer, he coaches them in football, basketball and baseball at Shroeder Jr High.

Hill balanced dialysis with his community work for six years—until a partnership with UC Health transplant surgeon E. Steve Woodle, MD, and participation in new research protocols, finally got him to transplantation. 

"There are 80,000 patients waiting for kidney transplant in the U.S.,” says Woodle. "About 20,000 of those are basically un-transplantable because they have so much immunity to other people’s kidneys. That immunity usually manifests itself in the form of high antibody levels.”

While Hill was on dialysis, more than 30 of his friends and family were tested to donate a kidney, but none matched. Hill’s antibodies were far too high and were at risk of rejecting most organs.

To enable a kidney transplant, Hills’ antibodies would have to be reduced via a treatment called desensitization. However, Hill’s antibody levels were so high that common therapy would likely fail.