Organ Transplantation Center
SMC's Organ Transplant Center has adopted a one-stop clinic incorporating highly specialized doctors, coordinators, and nurses to facilitate and optimize patient care before and after transplantation. Our center consists of a liver and small intestine transplant team, a kidney transplant team, hepatocyte transplant team, a pancreas and islet cell transplant team, a heart transplant team, and a lung transplant team. These teams work closely with the transportation support team, coma management team and tissue bank.
Major areas of treatment
- Kidney transplantation
- Liver/Liver Cell transplantation
- Heart transplantation
- Pancreas/Islet transplantation
- Lung transplantation
- Small Bowel transplantation
- Cornea transplantation
Strengths
The Organ Transplant Center allows a comprehensive approach to organ transplantation:
- Consultation before organ transplantation
- Counseling
- Enrollment on the organ recipient list
- Outpatient visits after organ transplantation
- Patient education
- Drug administration
Additionally, to minimize biliary complications after living donor liver transplantation, we have begun to apply new techniques during biliary anastomosis, which has decreased complications. We also actively engaged in ABO mismatch transplantations and, since then, we have shown a 100% success rate. In 2013, we performed Korea’s first kidney transplantation without the need for immunosuppressors by inducing immunologic tolerance, increasing the patient’s quality of life.
Latest treatment methods
- Laparoscopic hepatectomy on live liver donors
- Kidney transplantation with immunologic tolerance
- Donor clinic
Recent trends in clinical research
- Identified and analyzed significant genes in hepatocellular carcinomas to discover future targets for chemotherapy
- Gene studies of type B hepatitis after liver transplantation
- Immunotherapy for hepatocellular carcinomas
- Clinical trials on hepatocyte transplantation for patients with metabolic liver disorders
- Organic artificial livers for patients with acute liver failure (extracorporeal circulation treatment using hepatocyte xenograft)
- Research into liver stem cells to secure new sources for hepatocytes
- Isolation of porcine islets and research on pancreatic islet cell transplantation
- Pancreatic islet cell transplantation through isolation of human pancreatic islet cells
- Research into induction of immunologic tolerance based on kidney transplantation models of primates
- Research into islet cell transplantation in primates to optimize clinical islet cell transplantation
- Research using humanized mice
Other resources
Our team is dedicated to assisting other centers around the world with performing transplants. We performed liver transplants at Dar Al Fouad Hospital, Egypt and Hanoi National Children's Hospital, Vietnam and helped these centers start a liver transplant program. Many faculty members from Egypt, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, China, Mongolia, Mexico, Singapore and the US have visited our center for training and assistance.