Doctors at MGM Healthcare here recently performed a swap liver transplant involving two pairs of donors and recipients by successfully creating a bio-bubble to avoid the risk of SARS CoV-2 infection.
A statement by the hospital said this was the first time that such a swap transplant was done in Tamil Nadu under the Chief Minister’s Comprehensive Health Insurance Scheme.
Swap transplants are done when two patients have incompatible donors from their own family but the respective donors are compatible to donate to the other patient in the pair.
Thiagarajan Srinivasan, director of the Institute of Liver Diseases, Transplant and Hepatobiliary Surgery at the hospital, said that as per government norms, such surgeries must happen at the same time within the State but can be in two hospitals. “Both the donors must respectively be first degree relatives of the recipients involved,” he said.
Dr. Srinivasan said such transplants could save many lives, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic when cadaveric organs were not available. “With the compatibility of living donors from families restricted by the availability of liver with matched blood group and volume, the donor pool can be expanded through such swap transplants,” he said. Highlighting the risks involved in performing such surgeries during the pandemic, he said that a bio-bubble was created with a medical team involving 100 people and the close relatives of the donors and recipients.
Karthik Mathivanan, liver transplant surgeon at the hospital, said such a procedure required robust infrastructure and well-trained personnel to run four operation theatres simultaneously for several hours.
