By now you’ve probably heard of the amazing 18-surgery, two-day ordeal between two hospitals in California that managed to pull off a nine-way kidney transplant. But the technology behind it may be much more fascinating — and, potentially, hugely life-saving.

Kidney transplants are tough to get: there’s a waiting list of over 100,000 patients, and those suffering from renal failure who need a new kidney wait on average four to five years — and, since kidney problems tend to be so serious, that means more than 4,000 died last year waiting for that kidney.

So why is it so hard to get a new kidney? As it turns out, just because you’re closely related to a person doesn’t mean you’re a match, so even though, say, a son wanted to donate a kidney to her mother, he may have the wrong blood type, or there may be proteins in his body that will cause the mother’s body to reject the kidney.

So the challenge is matching up groups of people who have kidneys with people who need kidneys — and finally, a company called BiologicTx has come forward with an advanced computer algorithm that can match up people ont he list who were unable to get a kidney despite having plenty of donors who wanted to donate theirs, according to a New York Times report.

Right now, if you wanted a kidney, you’d either have to get on the national wait list and wait for years, or you would have to get one from a willing donor, who more than half the time is not a match. So this software does something entirely different: it decouples recipients from donors, and instead focuses on finding the best medical match. After that, it becomes a sort of exchange program: the son, instead of donating the kidney to the mother, donates it to someone who he is a perfect match with. In exchange, the system produces a donor that is suitable for his mother, and everyone’s happy.

So while the kidney supply problem is unlikely to disappear anytime soon, this system could potentially save lots of lives by speeding up a process for those who need it the most.