Pioneer in Organ Transplantation Dr. Roy Kahn Passes Away at 93

British Surgeon
Leading Research Since the 1950s

Dr. Roy Calne, a British surgeon who played a pioneering role in popularizing organ transplant surgery, has passed away.

Dr. Roy Calne, a British surgeon who pioneered organ transplant surgery
[Photo by AP News]

The U.S. daily newspaper The Washington Post (WP) reported on the 16th (local time) that Dr. Calne died on the 6th at the age of 93. Born in London, UK, in 1930, Dr. Calne led research in the field from the 1950s when organ transplantation was considered impossible, leaving a legacy as a founder of organ transplant surgery.

As a medical student in 1950, he became interested in organ transplantation after seeing a patient with kidney failure die without receiving any treatment. At that time, the medical community widely believed that organ transplantation was physically impossible and that there was no way to prevent the immune response that attacks the transplanted organ as a foreign invader.

To solve this, Dr. Calne conducted experiments on pigs, dogs, and other animals, and in 1954, he succeeded in kidney transplantation between identical twins for the first time. Following Dr. Thomas Starzl's world-first liver transplant in the United States in 1967, Dr. Calne succeeded in performing the first liver transplant in Europe in 1968. In 1986, together with fellow physician John Wallwork, he successfully performed the world's first heart, lung, and liver transplant on a single patient.

Not stopping there, in 1994, eight years later, he successfully led the world's first surgery to transplant the stomach, small intestine, liver, pancreas, and kidney into a single patient.

Dr. Calne was also the first to commercialize the immunosuppressant drug cyclosporine, essential for organ transplant surgery. In the 1970s, he was the first to use cyclosporine, developed by a Swiss pharmaceutical company, in surgery, raising the one-year survival rate of kidney transplant patients from the previous 50% to 80%. He served as a professor of medicine at the University of Cambridge for 33 years from 1965 to 1998. Even in his 70s, he personally performed transplant surgeries, and in his 80s, he showed undiminished passion by researching gene therapy for diabetes.

In 1986, he was knighted in recognition of his contributions to the medical field, and in 2012, he jointly received the Lasker Award, one of the most prestigious awards in medicine after the Nobel Prize, along with Dr. Thomas Starzl for pioneering the field of organ transplantation.

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