Park City resident with rare kidney disease seeks living donor

David Larason’s kidney function has fallen to 9 percent, and his doctors have told him he will be placed on dialysis if it drops to 7 percent. The Park City resident entered end-stage renal failure in November 2025, when his GFR fell below 15, and he and his wife, Taylar, are asking Summit County to help find a living donor before he reaches dialysis.

Larason has lived with membranoproliferative glomerulonephritis, or MPGN Type III, since third grade. At 15, his mother donated one of her kidneys, giving him a transplant that let him skip dialysis and stay active for more than two decades. He has since skied, mountain biked and explored Utah, but that kidney has now reached its 24th year and living-donor kidneys typically last 15 to 20 years.

The family moved to Park City in 2024 for the outdoors and the active lifestyle, and now that same community has become part of the search. Living donation offers the best odds for Larason because donor kidneys usually are better quality than deceased-donor kidneys, last nearly twice as long and can be transplanted much sooner. The wait for a deceased-donor kidney commonly runs 2 to 5 years or more, and Donate Life America puts the average at 3 to 5 years.

Anyone who wants to explore donation can start by contacting a transplant center. Prospective donors can begin the screening process by calling 801-581-2634, after which a donor coordinator reviews medical history and the team asks for blood pressure readings, blood and urine testing, and a donor education class offered on Fridays. If testing advances, the social worker review takes about an hour, the clinic appointment lasts about four to five hours, and surgery can be scheduled as soon as four weeks after approval.

The recipient’s insurance generally covers donor evaluation, surgery, hospital stay and follow-up appointments, though routine care and some out-of-pocket expenses can still fall on the donor, according to the National Kidney Foundation. It is illegal to pay someone for a kidney, but travel and wage-loss assistance may be available through donor support programs. If a direct match is not possible, paired exchange can still work by matching incompatible pairs through the National Kidney Registry or University of Utah Health’s paired donation program.

In Utah, 4,463 people were living with kidney failure, including 2,324 on dialysis and 2,139 with a kidney transplant, with 692 new kidney failure cases diagnosed in 2021, according to the American Kidney Fund’s Utah overview. Nationally, the United States set a record with 27,660 kidney transplants in 2024, and another person is added to the transplant waiting list every 10 minutes.