More than 100,000 people are on the waiting list for a life-saving organ transplant, but many of them unfortunately die before one becomes available.

Johns Hopkins Oncologist Christine Durand aims to allow more people, even those who are HIV positive, to donate their organs.

"It was a death sentence in the 1980s, if you got HIV Aids you were going to die a horrible death," Durand said. "With one pill once a day, you will live to an old age and die of something else."

Now it's even possible to donate and receive organs from people who are HIV positive.

Durand and HIV kidney donor Nina Martinez are working together to make it happen.

"We worked with congress to pass the Hope Act and started doing cadaveric kidneys and cadaveric livers," Durand said.

"And then, the first deceased donor HIV to HIV donor transplant happened in March 2016 at Johns Hopkins," Martinez said. "That's when I donated in 2019, also at Johns Hopkins, as the first living kidney donor with HIV."

Martinez was born HIV negative, but a blood transfusion as a child rendered her HIV positive. She is one of the first and only HIV positive kidney donors.

She's co-authored a paper with the next two living HIV donors to keep the push for more donor possibilities alive.

"We know that people living with HIV are not getting referred to transplant evaluation, and even if they are getting referred to transplant evaluation, they're not getting wait-listed," Martinez said. "It's the fact that people living with HIV who need organ transplants can be twice as likely to die while on the transplant wait list with everybody else."

That's why these two women are simultaneously working on HIV to non-HIV organ transplants, and hope to see the next frontier being positive to negative.  

Speaking of two women making an effort, these congresswomen, Nikema Williams and Katie Porter, led 23 colleagues in sending a letter to health and human services secretary Xavier Becerra, asking him to remove the barrier to people with HIV and to get organ transplants.