By Kay Quinn, KSDK-TV, January 21, 2008

Imagine the frustration of having a spouse or child who needs a life-saving kidney transplant, but has no donor.

In many cases, relatives of the patient offer to donate their kidneys, but they''re often not a good match.

Now, a unique organ exchange program is matching those willing donors with grateful recipients often hundreds of miles away.

A few hospitals around the country have begun this kind of kidney swap. Barnes-Jewish Hospital is joining in on the concept. And an Illinois man and his brother could be among the first to participate locally.

42-year-old Durant Blackmon of Troy, Illinois easily beats his older brother Stacey, who is 43, at computer golf. And when it comes to the game of life, Stacey is making Durant a big winner again. Durant needs a second kidney transplant, and Stacey offered one of his.

"It was like wow, you guys finally got around to calling me?" says Stacey. "I''ve always asked my mom, well, ''How come Durant never approaches me about this?''"

Durant says he didn''t want to put pressure on his brother, who lives in Florida with his wife and two children.

And it was a disappointing day when doctors discovered the two weren''t a good match. But hope has returned thanks to a new concept in kidney transplantation called the Paired Kidney Exchange Program.

"I thought it was a pretty good idea," says Durant, who is on the kidney transplant waiting list. "I didn''t know what he would think."

"You know what my question to him was?" says Stacey. "O.K. am I going to lose weight? Ha ha! How much does a kidney weigh?"

It''s all part of a unique partnership between Barnes-Jewish and Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.

Potential donors like Stacey and recipients like Durant here in St. Louis are matched with another mismatched pair on the list at Johns Hopkins.

If all four agree, they swap kidneys in simultaneous operations performed in the two cities on the same day.

"There''s about a 30 to 40 percent chance you can find someone on the list in terms of a match," says Barnes-Jewish nephrologist Dr. Matthew Koch, who is also director of the hospital''s high risk transplantation program. "So it greatly increases the odds of finding that and in the past that wasn''t available."

There are about 70,000 people on the kidney transplant waiting list. The wait for a cadaver donor can average five years.

Durant''s already been on the list for three years. A paired kidney exchange would end his need for dialysis three times a week, and could come soon.

"We''ve had a couple of hits already but the problem was with me, where I didn''t match. So actually it worked fairly fast," says Durant.

These brothers lost their father to kidney disease in 1989. He, too, had undergone a transplant that failed. When asked about this incredible gift Stacey is willing to give a stranger in the hopes of helping his brother, Stacey calls it a no-brainer.

"I''ve been living with this cloud of this disease for close to 20 years now," says Stacey, "and how it''s affected my family. And so if I have an opportunity to instill upon somebody the life that I''ve had, which is a very fortunate life, then that''s fine."

The Blackmons also hope their story gets others interested in organ donation.

"It''s something that you would wish other people would take a moment to think about because you never know when it''s going to affect your family," says Stacey.