Cleveland Clinic’s Weston Hospital has performed its first living donor liver transplant, in which a daughter donated a portion of her liver to her mother who had been battling complicated liver disease for several years.
The donor and recipient surgeries were performed in Weston by a team of surgeons from Cleveland Clinic Weston and Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, which has one of the nation’s largest living donor liver transplant programs.
On May 10, 2021, Cristiano Quintini, M.D., director of Liver Transplantation at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, and Weston Hospital transplant surgeons Samer Ebaid, M.D., Ph.D., and Phoenix Vuong, M.D., removed 60 percent of the right lobe of 38 year-old Heidy Lima’s liver through an abdominal incision.
In an operating room nearby, Koji Hashimoto, M.D., Ph.D., director of Living Donor Liver Transplantation at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, Antonio Pinna, M.D., director of Cleveland Clinic Weston’s Abdominal Transplant Center, and Weston transplant surgeon Sidharth Sharma, M.D., successfully transplanted the donated portion of Lima’s liver to her mother, 60-year old Iris Blanco.
“The collaboration between our transplant team in Weston and our colleagues in Ohio has been exceptional, allowing us to take this step forward and meet a critical need for living donor liver transplant services in South Florida, “said Conor Delaney, M.D., Ph.D., CEO and President of Cleveland Clinic’s Florida region. “As an integrated healthcare delivery system, we continue to expand our ability to provide multidisciplinary, complex care and improve the quality of life for our patients and their families.”
