PHOTO BY KAT CARLTON
futuristic, would expand the number of transplants by creating copies of a patient’s own kidney or using the building blocks from a non-immune-matched donor.
Sarah McPharlin hugs heart surgeon Valluvan Jeevanandam, MD, as her mother Dianne looks on. Jeevanandam was the heart surgeon in all six heart-liverkidney transplants performed at UChicago Medicine.
Because of these challenges, only one out of five donors who give organs of any kind provide suitable lungs for transplant. EVLP is a process that expands the pool of lungs that can be transplanted by evaluating the viability of lungs that may not meet standard criteria for donation. The lungs are placed in a machine that circulates solution through them to establish normal tissue flow and gently re-inflates them in a controlled manner. More than 50 percent of lungs evaluated with the system can be used for transplant, significantly increasing the number of patients who can get a transplant.
PHOTO BY NANCY WONG
Daru Smith and Sarah McPharlin, three months after they each received a new heart, liver and kidney.
All the pieces in place
Further out on the horizon, research that could restore or even rebuild a failing kidney is underway at the Institute for Molecular Engineering. Jeffrey Hubbell, PhD, the Eugene Bell Professor in Tissue Engineering, is collaborating with scientists from Northwestern University to develop technology that can generate new, functional kidneys by stripping out cells and leaving only the structural scaffolding. That scaffold could then be implanted into a recipient with new blood vessels and coaxed to grow cells that develop into new tissues. The technology, while
12
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MEDICINE AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DIVISION
All of these factors — highly skilled medical staff, visionary leadership, cutting-edge science and technology, and close partnerships with community organizations — are hallmarks of UChicago Medicine across all disciplines. But this unique combination of talent and resources combined with a history and culture of pushing the boundaries of patient care made the two triple-organ transplant procedures possible. “There are certainly other institutions out there that could have done those two procedures, but I feel strongly that for this kind of complex, dominoeffect surgery, you need somebody who’s been there before,” said Yolanda Becker, MD, professor of surgery and director of the kidney and pancreas transplantation program. Becker, who performed the kidney transplants for McPharlin and Smith, has also served as president of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network/United Network for Organ Sharing (OPTN/UNOS) board of directors, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that develops national organ transplantation policy. She has seen the UChicago Medicine transplantation program evolve over the years since joining the faculty in 2010. “We have had the pieces in place to do multi-organ transplants for a long time, but we’ve had different strengths at different times,” she said. “Now it has all come together at the same time, and we’re in a very good position to do some very new and innovative things.” The University of Chicago Medicine may never again perform multiple triple-organ transplants within the same year, let alone in less than two days. It was a stroke of luck that McPharlin and Smith were both on the waiting list in Chicago, that they both needed the same combination of organs and that they both found matching donors on consecutive days in December. But it certainly wasn’t luck that UChicago Medicine was prepared to save them. “It’s a good feeling to be able to get to yes,” Becker said. “And I think that for complex medical and surgical procedures — in all disciplines, quite frankly — UChicago Medicine is a place where people work very hard to get to yes for the patient.”