About Silverstone Solutions
Silverstone Solutions was founded in 2006 with
the goal of delivering efficient, cost-effective technology solutions to the
medical and healthcare industries. Our flagship product, Matchmaker,
is a clinical application that allows hospitals and transplant organizations
to more quickly and accurately match kidney transplant patients who have qualified,
but incompatible, donors with an alternate compatible donor. The software utilizes
three proprietary algorithms to generate all potential paired donations and
also optimizes the greatest number of transplants for an entire pool of paired-exchange
candidates.
David S. Jacobs is the President and CEO of Silverstone Solutions,
Inc.. He founded the company as a result of his own experience as an end-stage
renal disease (ESRD) patient who was on the deceased donor organ waiting list for
3.5 years. Mr. Jacobs suffers from polycystic kidney disease (PKD), a common,
genetic, life-threatening disease affecting more than 600,000 Americans and
an estimated 12.5 million people worldwide. Mr. Jacobs received a living donor
kidney in December 2004 and subsequently committed himself to developing a
better way to utilize the scarce availability of viable organs for transplantation.
Knowing that living donor transplants are more successful than deceased donor organ
transplants, he immediately set about the task of developing a database to
help California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC), his transplant hospital, produce
alternate recipients for incompatible living donors.
Initially, Mr. Jacobs had no commercial intentions for
the software. He was simply grateful for the second
chance he'd been given and wanted to use his
background in technology to help others in the same
predicament. He began working closely with CPMC in
order to understand the issues hospitals face in organ
procurement and donor testing. Using his own money and
some grant money from CPMC, Mr. Jacobs began leading
the development effort.
What Mr. Jacobs initially perceived as a simple
database program grew into a full-featured clinical
application. Early on in development, he discovered
that the problem of finding suitable paired donation
matches was more multifaceted than a simple search of
the database. Matching blood type, antigen avoids and
ethics were critical data physicians needed to make
appropriate decisions. In addition, it was important
not take the sole potential donor organ away from one
recipient and pair it with another recipient who may
have multiple potential donors. Thus, optimization of the
pool also became a key feature of the program. To try
to match a pool of just 200 people can involve
millions of permutations and take weeks and months to
compute using existing processes. Because of this complexity, an algorithm was developed to look at all of the parameters, including
blood type matching and cross matching against a
larger pool of people, in order to be more predictive
in the quality of matches. New problems arose, such as how to
prioritize matches when multiple donors are possible
and the impact the match may have on the overall
quality of the pool. Silverstone Solutions’ optimization
technology solves these problems and generates the
greatest number of paired donations for a pool, without
limiting the clinician’s input on what the
final pairings should be.
In parallel to product development,
Mr. Jacobs works from a policy point of view and has met with members of Congress
to further the cause of paired donation and government-funded research for
kidney disease. He continues to keep a keen eye on the needs of patients and
has other products in development that will address other patient needs such
as drug management and improving communication with doctors and hospital staff
regarding patient history and care.
Contact Us
Silverstone Solutions Team