A 34-year-old man with the extremely rare ‘Bombay’ blood group underwent a successful kidney transplant at the Jawaharlal Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research (Jipmer) here.Jipmer in a release said the man was referred to the hospital with kidney failure for renal transplant. His mother was willing to donate her kidney. However, on evaluation, it was found the patient had the extremely rare ‘Bombay’ blood group, which made the transplantation process a challenging task for the hospital administration.“Bombay blood group is an extremely rare blood type, first described in a patient in Mumbai. The blood group is seen in one in 50,000 to 1 lakh individuals. People with the ‘Bombay’ blood group do not match any of the four usual blood groups. In addition, people with the group will have antibodies against common blood group antigen called the ‘H’ antigen. This antibody will cause immediate rejection of the transplanted kidney. The rejection has to be managed with specific drugs as well as a procedure called therapeutic plasma exchange. Because of the difficulty in the availability of matching blood, as well as risk of rejection, it is extremely difficult to do transplantation for people with ‘Bombay’ blood group,” the release said.For the particular patient, Jipmer said the Transfusion Medicine Department collaborated with the Puvi Foundation, which conducts philanthropic activities to increase public blood donation. Three units of ‘Bombay’ blood group bags were arranged from Nashik and Anantapur and stocked at Jipmer’s blood bank. As a backup plan, a person with the ‘Bombay’ blood group was brought from Karaikal and stationed at the hospital till the operation was completed. The operation was conducted successfully and his anti-H antibody levels were monitored daily for one week after transplant. The kidney functioned immediately after the transplantation, and he has had normal kidney function at discharge. There are only three previous reports of organ transplantation involving the ‘Bombay’ blood group in India. One instance involved kidney transplantation in a patient the rare blood group in Chennai, and there was another instance of a mother with the group donating her kidney to her daughter in Hyderabad. The third case was of a donor with the ‘Bombay’ blood group donating a liver to a patient with liver failure. The transplant for the patient at Jipmer was done free of cost under the “Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana”. The hospital has so far performed 439 kidney transplant operations, including 319 from living donors and 120 from deceased donors. The institute has also performed 15 kidney transplants across the ABO blood group barrier (ABO incompatible kidney transplantation) in the past 3 years. Jipmer has an active deceased donor organ transplantation programme and has procured organs from 60 deceased (brain dead) donors in last 12 years, the release said. Published - July 19, 2026 11:49 pm IST