Türkiye has become a global centre for liver transplantation, with the recent world-first eight-way cross-liver transplant sealing this reputation, said the country’s Health Minister last week.
The fully synchronised operation involving eight living donors and eight recipients, reports Hurriyet Daily News.
Minister Kemal Memisoglu congratulated Professor Sezai Yilmaz and his team at İnönü University Liver Transplant Institute in Malatya for the successful procedure, calling it a milestone in medical history.
“A new world first has been achieved at our Inonu University Liver Transplant Institute,” he said. “Yilmaz and his estimable team have written their names in medical history with this transplant.”
Around 1 800 liver transplants are performed annually in Türkiye, with more than 300 of those carried out at the institute.
The recent complex procedure, carried out during the institute’s 25th anniversary year, enabled eight patients to receive life-saving liver transplants despite initial incompatibility with their own family donors.
Through a co-ordinated exchange system, each donor gave a portion of their liver to a compatible recipient in another family, forming an interconnected chain of eight simultaneous surgeries.
The matching was made possible by a sophisticated algorithm developed by Turkish economists Tayfun Sönmez and Utku Ünver. The system rapidly analyses blood type, tissue compatibility and organ size to identify rare exchange cycles among large groups of donor–patient pairs.
In this case, it identified a viable eight-way match, allowing all transplants to proceed at the same time.
The procedure is considered highly complex because it requires extensive compatibility testing and the co-ordination of multiple surgical teams and operations.
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