Roy Calne: surgeon and pioneer in organ transplantation

bmj;384/jan31_15/q210/FAF1faCredit: Cambridge University HospitalsHistory highlights “firsts” and Roy Calne may have had a record number. He led Europe’s first liver transplant (1968); the world’s first combined liver, heart, and lung transplant, with John Wallwork (1987); the UK’s first intestinal transplant (1992); and the world’s first multivisceral transplant combining stomach, intestine, pancreas, liver, and kidney cluster (1994).ImmunosuppressionBut his biggest contribution to transplantation was perhaps the introduction of cyclosporin (now ciclosporin), “the penicillin of immunosuppression.” He is reported to have been the first doctor to use an immunosuppressant effective in reducing organ rejection.This followed a unique rescue operation in November 1977, when he and Cambridge immunologist David White flew to Switzerland to persuade manufacturers Sandoz to persevere with the drug. They had planned to shelve it, concerned that the 1970s transplant market was too small to warrant a possible $500m outlay—transplants then were almost exclusively restricted to kidneys.In his book Knife to…
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