A woman from Dak Nong Province will receive a liver transplant in the first operation of its kind in HCMC. The surgery will be performed at Cho Ray Hospital on Friday. After many tests and consultations, doctors at the hospital and their counterparts from ASAN Medical Center in South Korea finally decided to conduct a liver transplant on C.T.K.D, 52, who has suffered from liver failure since 2010. As scheduled, a 15-member group from the South Korean center will arrive in HCMC on October 11 to join their Vietnamese counterparts for the transplant surgery a day later. The liver donor is the woman’s son, D.H.L, who is now a 22-year-old student of information technology at the HCMC Foreign Language and Informatics University. L. was chosen after the patient’s mother, husband and daughter were all deemed unqualified to be a donor. Dr Nguyen Tan Cuong, from Cho Ray Hospital, said he has nurtured a dream of performing the first transplant of liver on an adult for the past 10 years. In preparations for such a transplant, the hospital performed liver transplants on 60 pigs between 1999 and 2003. Over the past two years, the hospital sent its doctors and nurses to ASAN for liver transplant training. Cho Ray’s doctors have also been sent to the US and some European countries to learn about and collect experience in liver transplant. Liver transplantation will help save the lives of many patients with serious liver diseases, even cancer, Cuong said. After the first transplant, which will be performed thanks to a healthy donor, doctors will carry out a second case involving a brain-dead donor, said Dr. Cuong. The cost of each transplant operation is more than VND1 billion (US$48,000), which will be funded by the Health Ministry and Cho Ray Hospital, the doctor said.

In Singapore the cost is four times higher, and in some other countries it is twice as high, he added.