User:Dr Ramdip Ray/Centre for Liver and Biliary Sciences : CLBS@Artemis

Centre for Liver & Biliary Sciences : CLBS@Artemis new article content ...

Liver Transplantation is perhaps the greatest surgical endeavor on the human body as of today - not only in terms of the surgical complexity, the duration of the operations, the costs and human effort involved - but also in terms of the social, the familial and the emotional challenges it can pose.No other operation comes anywhere as close. Much of the initial work on Liver transplantation has been done by Thomas E Starzl and the evolution of this high end specialty has been essayed nicely by Starzl himself in a recent publication. As Starzl was busy doing a lot of work on liver transplantation that would go on to become the foundations of the future success of transplant, 4 other centers were founded during this period: the first by Roy Calne (Cambridge, UK) in 1968, followed by Henri Bismuth (Paris),Rudolf Pichlmayr (Hannover, Germany) and Rudi Krom (Gronigen, The Netherlands) during the 1970s. The technical advances in liver transplant surgery were not enough to make liver transplant sustainable till, in 1979 Sir Roy Calne from Cambridge reported the use of Cyclosporine for Immunosuppression in 34 transplants including 2 liver transplants. A further advance was the combination of Cyclosporine with steroids ( prednisolone ) by Starzl's group, thus reducing the adverse effects of using only Cyclosporine. This meant that by the end of the 70s most patients were alive more than a year after liver trsnaplsnts.