Odesa: from Vision Regained to Transplanted Hearts

In 1936, Ukraine’s and the then USSR’s first experimental research Institute of Ophthalmology was founded on the basis of the Odesa Medical College. Later on, thanks to the genius of surgeon Volodymyr Filatov, it became the world’s leading Institute of Eye Diseases and Tissue Therapy. And now Odesa experts are finishing the design of the Transplantation Operating Center, to become Eastern Europe’s leading clinic where surgeons will begin heart transplants in the next few years. The city, where surgeons successfully operated for the first time in history on the eye cornea and returned to a blind man the joy of seeing the surrounding world, is going to soon build a clinic which will make it possible to give a new lease on human life by replacing the heart.

Meanwhile, medical science organizers, including Odesa Medical University Rector Valery Zaporozhan, have to rely primarily on the support of their foreign medical colleagues in establishing and developing research institutions. “We hope to continue deservedly the tradition of transplants begun by the genius of Filatov with the assistance of the outstanding contemporary surgeon Christiaan Nietling Barnard,” Professor Zaporozhan shares his plans for the coming years. “We have already begun, assisted by Odesa Mayor Ruslan Bodelan and Odesa Oblast Governor Hrynevetsky, to draw up the project of the Transplant Operations Center, a unique medical research establishment in Eastern Europe. Thus successful heart transplant operations begun by the group of South African surgeons headed by Dr. Barnard in 1967 in the Grote Schuur hospital will continue in Ukraine a year or two from now. Of equal importance for us is the support for this multinational project from Ukraine’s Ministry of Public Health and Academy of Medical Sciences, especially academy president Oleksandr Vozianov. This will be a research and treatment center worth about $200 million, in which our foreign colleagues and partners will be able to invest.”

Heart and other organs transplants, in Prof. Zaporozhan’s opinion, are technically no more complex than those performed by specialists at the Surgery Research Institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Medical Sciences, headed by Academician Hennady Knyshov. However, Odesa strives for a comprehensive solution of transplant problems in terms of technology, organization, and maintenance. “Foreign partners have seen for themselves,” Prof. Zaporozhan notes, “that programs of our joint project have been coordinated with the leading institutions run by the Ukrainian Academy of Medical Sciences and Public Health Ministry.” Operations in the center will be performed by leading national surgeons who will do advanced studies in the foreign clinics set up by Dr. Barnard’s research and investment group. All this is fixed in agreements on further cooperation between the medical universities in Cape Town and Odesa and on the establishing the center between Dr. Barnard’s and Odesa Mayor Bodelan. Prof. Zaporozhan added that the law On the Transplantation of Human Organs and Other Anatomical Materials recently passed by Verkhovna Rada, will also promote the development of organ transplant technologies in the next century. A work group is expected to arrive in Odesa from Cape Town in February, which is supposed to begin funding the construction of two Transplantation Operations Center six-story buildings on Pasteur Street.