HOBART, Ind. (WLS) — For all its benefits, life after a kidney transplant can be a challenge.

Most patients remain on anti-rejection medication for life. But for one Indiana man, the opportunity to be part of a clinical trial, at Northwestern Medicine allowed him to forgo all that and keep living life to the fullest.

Fourteen years ago, Edward Jones received a kidney transplant.

He needed the organ after the constant dialysis that slowed down the then firefighter’s on-the-go life.

“We actually went on a vacation where I had to spend two days on dialysis. Which didn’t’ turn out to be much of a vacation for me,” Jones said.

It was his eldest son of four, also named Edward, who donated not just a kidney but his stem cells.

Edward Jones says he is grateful for his son’s donation and for the clinical trial.

It was that second still experimental procedure that made all the difference.

“I was all in when I heard I could be off immunosuppressant drugs within a year,” Jones said. “It tricks your body into believing that whatever was transplanted in my case the kidney, it actually belongs in the body.”

Fewer than 50 people nationwide have taken part in these clinical trials, most of them were done at Northwestern Medicine.

Fourteen years later and Jones is now retired from the fire department but still living a life on-the-go, traveling all over the country and the world with his wife Gisele.

“I think it brought us closer as husband and wife. I never had an opportunity to care for someone like that,” his wife said.

“It’s a distant memory now. I don’t have to think about it every day. I have to take this. I have to pick up this prescription,” Jones said.

While the clinical trials that Jones was a part of were delayed by the pandemic, his surgeons hope that the long-term data provided by patients like him will move the FDA to make this type of stem cell procedures more widely available to kidney transplant patients within the next five to ten years.