Today, Marek Pycia‘s paper on UCLA’s voucher system was featured in Reuters. Traditionally, kidney donors directly donate kidneys to their relatives. However, what if the kidney donor is elderly, and the relative does not need the kidney immediately (e.g. they have early stage kidney disease)? Professor Pycia’s paper discusses UCLA’s new voucher system which enables donors to “pay it forward”, donating today in return for a promise that their relative will be at the front of the queue when they need a kidney. The paper is with Jeffrey Veale, a member of UCLA’s Medical School, and other coauthors. It is published in Transplantation and has become the basis for a national system of kidney transplant vouchers used by over twenty transplant centers.