First Live Tissue Artery Transplant

A United Kingdom patient suffering from arterial disease has become the first person in the country to receive a life saving artery transplant using live human artery tissue flown in specially from the United States.

John Young suffered years of ill health and three major cardiac operations due to suffering from arterial disease which left him close to death. Mr Young required a replacement of the Aorta, which is the main artery coming from the base of the heart and the two branches coming from it which feed the left and right hand side of the body.

In an interview broadcast on British television today, Mr young stated ’sometimes when you’re in hospital and they clean up wounds you scream out – but i never felt like that. I felt down, and I didn’t feel well, but I wasn’t in violent pain’. This is a little known, and interesting insight into the type of pain that arterial disease causes.

Normally, surgeons would use use synthetic material to replace damaged arteries, but in this case that was not possible, for medical reasons. Instead, live human tissue donated from a donor in America was flown in specially, and was used in a ground breaking 9 hour operation at St. Richard’s Hospital in Chichester, England – the first of it’s kind in the country.

In an interview given to the BBC, the Consultant Vascular Surgeon who led the British operation, Mr. Hany Hafez commented ‘I feel privileged to have received the necessary support to allow us to do this. Without the system supporting the team, it would not have worked’.

Just two weeks after the operation, the patient is back at home and well on the road to recovery.

The operation cost over $150,000, but is seen as being ‘well worth it’ as Mr Young would have almost certainly died imminently without it.