British surgeon Roy Calne, who performed the first liver transplant in Europe in 1968, died on Saturday aged 93, his family said this Sunday.
The surgeon and emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge, born in 1930, died of heart failure on Saturday evening in Cambridge, southeast England, the family said in a statement.
Roy Calne had a “wonderful, slightly eccentric” personality and was a “wonderful father of six children” who were “very proud” of him, according to statements from his son Russell to the BBC.
The specialist performed Europe’s first liver transplant, performed at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge on May 2, 1968, to a 46-year-old woman suffering from liver cancer, shortly after the world’s first liver transplant in the United States.
Portuguese surgeon João Rodrigues Peña was part of his team, responsible in 1992 for the first liver transplant program in Portugal at the Curry Cabral Hospital in Lisbon.
Between 1967 and 1969, the Portuguese surgeon Eduardo Barroso also worked with Roy Calne at Cambridge on a Gulbenkian Foundation grant in the university’s Department of Surgery and in that hospital’s Surgery and Transplantation Service.
Roy Kaln became interested in organ transplants in the 1950s, partly inspired by his father’s work as an auto mechanic, the surgeon later admitted, but was then told the procedure was impossible.
Like American Thomas Starzl, who had performed the procedure before, the British surgeon was trying to develop treatments to prevent organ rejection because many patients died in the beginning.
The recipient of Europe’s first liver transplant will die within two months due to an infection resulting from immunosuppressive drugs given to her to prevent organ rejection.
Since then, Caln has focused on finding new ways to prevent organ rejection, helping develop the innovative drug cyclosporine and becoming the first doctor to prescribe it to transplant patients.
Anti-organ rejection drugs have increased the chances of survival of transplant patients, saving thousands of lives since their widespread use in the 1980s.
Caln also participated in the world’s first three-organ transplant (liver, lung and heart) in 1986, and in 1994 performed a six-organ transplant: liver, kidney, stomach, duodenum, small intestine and pancreas.
In 1986, Queen Elizabeth II awarded the surgeon the title of Sir.
Author: Lusa
Source: CM Jornal
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