Introduction: In Dec 2014, Dr. Jiefu Huang, the director of the National Organ Donation and Transplantation Committee of China declared the total cessation of the use of death penalty prisoners’ organ for transplantation in China, effective on January 1st, 2015. Therefore, the community based organ donation has become the only legitimate source of deceased organ transplantation in China since then. This action marks 2015 as the starting year of a new era for organ donation and transplantation in China. The article aims at providing an overview on the national statistics of the organ donation and transplantation of China in 2015.

Method: China Organ Transplant Response System (COTRS) is the mandatory national organ allocation system, under the authority of National Heath and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC). All of the 131 organ procurement organizations (OPOs) and 169 licensed transplant hospitals were mandated to use COTRS for organ allocation to ensure the fairness and transparency in the process, as well as the traceability of all donated organs requested by the Regulation on Human Organ Transplantation. The data of COTRS was used to generate the statistics of the deceased donors, the characteristics of transplant candidates (liver/kidney) on waitlist, organ allocation and the post-transplant outcomes of China in 2105.

Results: During the year of 2015, 12 154 kidney transplant candidates and 4,076 liver transplant candidates were registered on the waiting list of COTRS, whereas 113 for kidney and 250 for liver died respectively while waiting for transplant. The number of patients remaining on kidney wait list is 22 995 by the end of 2015 and 2,243 for liver. In 2015, there were 2766 deceased organ donation in China, a significant increase of 62.5% compared to the number of community based deceased organ donation in 2014 (1702 cases). Among them, 48.6% were donors of China Category III (Donation after brain death followed by cardiac death). Brain trauma is the most frequent-seen (48.3%) cause of death. The median age of donors is 37.5 years. There were 30.79% of the procured livers and 5.14% of the procured kidneys were shared at national level through COTRS in 2015. The discard rates were 15.2% for liver and 6.5% for kidney. The post-liver transplant survival at 3 months, 6 months and one year were 90.17%,87.62% and 81.85% respectively, which is significantly lower than those of living donor liver transplantation.

Conclusion: China has completely transformed into the community based deceased organ donation and transplantation upon the total cessation on the use of death penalty prisoners’ organ for transplantation in 2015. The detailed data of the 2766 altruistic donors was captured and analyzed by COTRS, which signified China’s organ transplantation has stepped into a new era in 2015.