Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Toronto General Hospital performs 100th lung transplant this year

This exceeds the 87 lung transplants performed there in 2006.

Toronto General Hospital is the world's leading lung transplant center with world-class state-of-the-art facilities and research laboratories. The world's first successful lung transplants were done at Toronto General and it continues to be a pioneer by raising the bar in both transplantation and research.

Director of the lung transplant program in Toronto is Dr. Shaf Keshavjee, world renowned for his work in lung transplantation (see publications). He is also director of the research labs that are doing truly exciting and groundbreaking experiments in transplantation. Their major project is gene therapy in lung transplantation where they are working on techniques to genetically modify the donor lung so that it is better able to deal with the stress imposed upon it by the transplantation process.

This could lead to an increase in the availability of useable donor lungs and get more patients off the waiting list to receive their life-saving transplant. Right now, only about 1 of every 5 donor lungs turn out to be viable for transplantation.

The scientists are also using gene therapy to grow tissue, and hopefully someday new lungs entirely.

Congratulations to the lung transplant team at Toronto General Hospital!


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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Out of these 100 lung transplants I would like to know how many were successful and how many resulted in multiple complications such as stroke, sepsis infections and seizures?