Korean Liver Transplantation Blossomed in Costa Rica on the Opposite Side of the Earth

Costa Rican Medical Staff Trained in Liver Transplant at Seoul Asan Hospital
Successful First Adult Living Donor Liver Transplant in Their Country in April

The liver transplantation technique, first developed 30 years ago by a Korean surgeon to save patients with end-stage liver disease, has been transferred to Costa Rica on the other side of the globe and has borne its first fruit.

Seoul Asan Medical Center announced on the 23rd that the liver transplant team at Calderon Guardia Hospital, under the Costa Rican Social Security Fund, recently succeeded in performing the first adult living-donor liver transplant in Costa Rica based on the liver transplantation techniques learned at Seoul Asan Medical Center.

Medical staff of the Calderon Hospital liver transplant team who came for liver transplant training at Seoul Asan Medical Center in 2019.
[Photo by Seoul Asan Medical Center]

According to the hospital, Janet Lorio (60), a patient with liver cirrhosis, was able to regain her health miraculously after successfully receiving a liver transplant from her daughter. This liver transplant surgery applied the "modified right lobe liver transplantation" first devised in 1991 by Professor Seung-Gyu Lee, Chair of the Liver Transplantation and Hepatobiliary Surgery Department at Seoul Asan Medical Center. The modified right lobe liver transplantation is a surgical technique that creates a new middle hepatic vein in the transplanted right lobe to ensure proper blood drainage throughout the entire right lobe, thereby increasing the success rate of living-donor liver transplant surgeries.

Calderon Guardia Hospital, one of the leading hospitals in Costa Rica, has over 550 beds and was the first in Costa Rica and Central America to perform liver, pancreas, small intestine, and lung transplants. Based on their transplantation experience, the liver transplant team at Calderon Hospital sought cooperation from Seoul Asan Medical Center, which had developed the modified right lobe liver transplantation and the 2-to-1 living-donor liver transplantation for the first time in the world and performed 5,000 living-donor liver transplants in 2018 alone. In May 2019, Seoul Asan Medical Center decided to transfer the living-donor liver transplantation techniques, and 24 medical staff from Calderon Hospital’s liver transplant team underwent liver transplant training at Seoul Asan Medical Center five times by December of that year.

After returning to their home country, the Calderon Hospital liver transplant team established various systems locally, including a living-donor liver transplant surgery program, improvements in vascular reconstruction for liver transplantation, laparoscopic surgery programs, standardization of liver transplant nursing techniques, intensive care unit nursing management, and infection control for liver transplant recipients. Based on these systems, they finally succeeded in performing an adult living-donor liver transplant surgery in April this year. Professor Vanes Lopez, head of the liver-pancreas-biliary and transplant surgery team at Calderon Guardia Hospital, who performed the surgery, said, "With the help of the Seoul Asan Medical Center liver transplant team, the lives of patients and families here in Costa Rica have changed. We sincerely thank the Seoul Asan Medical Center liver transplant team for wholeheartedly transferring their medical skills until we succeeded in becoming self-reliant in living-donor liver transplantation."

Professor Seung-Gyu Lee said, "I recall the Costa Rican medical staff who worked hard to learn even one more thing during their training with us. I want to extend my deepest congratulations and gratitude to the Calderon Hospital liver transplant team for successfully performing this difficult surgery on their own." He emphasized, "We will continue to transfer medical technology wherever our help is needed so that many patients around the world can have a chance at a new life."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.