LONDON (AP) — Roy Calne, the organ transplant pioneer who led Europe’s first liver transplant operation in 1968, has died at the age of 93.
Karun’s family announced that he died late Saturday in Cambridge, England, where he was emeritus professor of surgery at the University of Cambridge.
Born in 1930, Mr Calne trained as a doctor at Guy’s Hospital in London and became interested in organ transplants in the 1950s, which he later said was partly influenced by his father’s work as a car mechanic. Told. At that time, I was told that surgery was not possible.
He is considered one of the fathers of organ transplantation, along with American scientist Dr. Thomas Starzl. Research into surgical procedures and treatments to prevent organ rejection was first conducted in dogs. In 1960, Calun’s experiments on dogs first demonstrated that drugs could prevent organ rejection. Mr. Starzl attempted the first human liver transplant in his 1963. The patient died during surgery.
The next few patients also died within weeks of the transplant, but surgery showed that the transplanted liver could still function.
“It was terrible at first. There were so many scary complications,” Karun said in 1999.
In May 1968, Calne led a transplant operation on a 46-year-old woman with liver cancer at Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge. The patient died two months later from an infection caused by immunosuppressive drugs given to prevent rejection.
Calun focused on finding better ways to prevent patients’ bodies from rejecting donor organs. He helped develop the breakthrough anti-rejection drug cyclosporin and was the first physician to administer it to transplant patients.
Anti-rejection drugs have changed a patient’s chances of survival, and liver transplants have saved thousands of lives since becoming widely accepted in the 1980s.
Mr. Karun also helped perform the world’s first three-organ transplant: liver, lung, and heart in 1986, and led the first six-organ transplant in 1994: liver, kidney, stomach, duodenum, small intestine, and pancreas.
In 1974, Calun was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s National Academy of Sciences, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1986.
In 2012, Calne and Starzl jointly received the prestigious Lasker Award for their research. In 2021, Addenbrooke’s Hospital named the UK’s largest transplant unit after Calne.
Karun was also an accomplished artist who painted portraits of dozens of patients and medical colleagues.
