Transplant Programs at Mayo Clinic

Innovation Keeps the Field Moving Forward

Since surgeons performed the first kidney transplant at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota in 1963, thousands of organ recipients have benefited from the collective, innovative skills of Mayo's transplant leaders.

A number of transplant procedures have been pioneered at Mayo. Transplant surgeons in Rochester were the first in the United States to perform a quadruple transplant — heart, double lung and liver. They also were among the first to employ a rare "domino" procedure, a method of optimizing scarce organs, in which cadaver heart, liver and kidney were placed into one patient, who donated a liver that would function normally outside his body to someone else.

Some of these same state-of-the-art procedures are now taking center stage at Mayo Clinic in Florida and Arizona, where programs are newer, but staff, many of whom trained or worked in Rochester, are already leading the field. Until Mayo Clinic in Arizona began its bone transplant program in 1993, no other hospital in metropolitan Phoenix offered such a service. Likewise, until liver and kidney transplants were initiated in 1999, the city was the largest U.S. metropolitan area without these services.

Similarly, Mayo Clinic in Florida already has begun advancing multiple-organ transplants. In 2002, Pam Gill, a 43-year-old former telemetry technician, received a lifesaving heart, double-lung, and liver transplant, after being turned down by other institutions as too sick. Her quadruple procedure was only the fourth such transplant in the nation and the second for a Mayo Clinic team.

Research Advances the Field

Patients also benefit from Mayo Clinic scientists working at the forefront of the field to advance knowledge of organ replacement. Through Rochester's Transplantation Biology Program, for example, researchers are exploring novel ways to generate new organs for the 80,000-plus transplant candidates waiting for donor organs each day.

Techniques such as cellular transplants, stem cell tissue engineering and organ development are being pursued as potential approaches for treating transplant patients. Another potential approach is xenotransplantation, a strategy of using the cells, tissues or organs of animals. In the future, xenografts, as they are called, may be an alternative to human organ grafts for patients with organ failure.

Mayo's studies already have generated discoveries with broad implications. Findings on the immune system's role in creating antibodies for organs, for example, have produced clues on how a cell becomes cancerous and spreads.