The Union health ministry is planning to set up a National Bio-material Center to cater to the growing demands of organ transplantation in the country.

Though there are a few centres like Jeevandaan in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, run by the state governments and one centre in Tamil Nadu, they are not well established and are lacking required infrastructure and facilities need for organ storage, transportation from one place to other during transplant. Most of them are hit by fund crunch.

Having learned this, the central government had decided to establish a centrally managed national level bio-material center.  By this new center coming into force at national level, the government is looking to fill up the gap between the demand and supply of human organs for transplantation in the country.

The National Bio-material Centre will contain all the body organs, like bones, fresh human amniotic membrane, cadaveric joints like knees, hips and shoulders, cranium bone graft, loose bone fragments, skin grafts, cornea, heart valves and vessels.

While, the process of setting up a national level bio-material center has already been initiated in Delhi, five state level bio-material centers (tissue banks) are also in the anvil.

The health ministry has already approached Maharashtra, West Bengal, Assam and Tamil Nadu to submit plans for setting up state level bio-material centers.

At present the Organ Retrieval Banking Organization (ORBO) at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi acts as the nodal centre for the purpose of encouraging organ donations, fair and equitable distribution and optimum utilisation of human organs. It maintains a waiting list of terminally ill patients requiring transplants, donor registration, matching of recipients with donor, coordination from procurement of organs to transplantation etc.

However, to make it easy for the people waiting for organ transplantation, the Union health ministry has proposed to set up the bio- material centres in each state.

Experts say that the plan is to connect the centers at the district level so that people do not die waiting for an organ donation.  In India every year 1.5 lakh new patients require kidney transplants, against which only 3,000 transplants are done. Some 6,000 people remain on dialysis, which means limited life span.

“The main thrust and objective of establishing the national level centre is to fill up the gap between ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ of organs for transplantations well as ‘Quality Assurance’ in the availability of various tissues,” said a source at the health ministry.

The Transplantation of Human Organs (Amendment) Act 2011 had included the component of tissue donation and registration of tissue banks, making it imperative under the changed circumstances to establish a National Level Tissue Bank to fulfill the demands of tissue transplantation.