Transplant Surgery
New chief outlines future directions
Over the years, the UW Medical Center has been carrying on the tradition of recruiting doctors who are the best and brightest at what they do. Dr. Jorge Reyes certainly fits the criteria.
Reyes joined the UW faculty in July 2004. He is a professor and chief of the Division of Transplantation in the Department of Surgery. He is also the director of transplant surgery for the UWMC Transplant Service Line and director of transplant surgery at Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center.
A liver transplant is performed at UW Medical Center by Dr. Jorge Reyes (right).
Before coming to Seattle, Reyes was director of Pediatric Liver and Intestine Transplantation at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. He was also part of the Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute and professor of surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
In Pittsburgh, Reyes was responsible for developmental strides in areas such as intestinal transplantation, organ allocation policies and split-liver and living-related transplantation, which are transplantations in which the patient receives a section of the liver from a relative.
Reyes developed surgical techniques in splitting off a small section of the left side of the liver for transplantation in children. He has also been recognized for surgical techniques he developed in pediatric multi-organ transplantation. A multi-organ transplantation is one in which the patient needs a combination of organs transplanted at the same time.
"I've transplanted patients with combinations of lung, heart and liver or liver, intestine, kidney or liver, intestine, pancreas, stomach," Reyes said. "There are various complications of the different operations and those are the techniques that I helped develop."
 |
| Dr. Jorge Reyes concentrates during a transplant procedure. |
At Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh, Reyes led the team of surgeons who, for the first time, transplanted a heart, both lungs and a liver in a child. The procedure lasted 20 hours. According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, a transplant involving the heart, lungs and liver has been done only once in the United States on an adult in 1996.
Organ transplantation at the UW Medical Center can be traced back to January1968 when Dr. Tom Marchioro performed Washington State's first kidney transplant. Reyes admires the UW transplantation program and plans on adding to its already long list of achievements.
"It's been building itself up with a series of successes where the patients that have been treated have survived," Reyes said.
Reyes has already thought about changes that can further the achievements of the transplantation program..
"We're going to grow," he said. "We're going to develop new areas of transplantation such as split-liver and living-related donors for liver from adult to child and adult to adult and intestinal transplantation and multi-organ, abdominal and thoracic transplantation."
Reyes also predicts many other advances .
"The possibilities I see are the development of other combinations of transplants and other techniques in transplantation," he said.
Reyes also sees the possibility of innovations in overall patient care such as using different strategies for managing the immune system and reducing rejection of the transplanted organ. He would also like to see if it would be possible to get patients off immunosuppressants eventually.
Since Reyes' first day as a UW faculty member, changes in the transplantation program have already been taking place.
"We increased our ability to assess suitability for grafts so that we are able to take advantage of the organ donor pool in this region," Reyes said. "We've added flexibility to the selection of the patients so we're able to serve our patient population community better. We've also changed immunosuppressant protocol to address the ever-present theory there are problems with toxicity of drugs and injections."
Reyes received his medical education in Brazil, then came to the United States to study in 1982. He completed residencies in trauma surgery, general surgery, and surgical pathology in Brazil and the United States. He trained in transplantation at the University of Pittsburgh under Thomas Starzl, with whom he has worked for the past 15 years. Reyes served a clinical fellowship in surgical pathology at Harvard Medical School in Boston and a fellowship in transplantation at the University of Pittsburgh.
Reyes is listed among the best doctors in America and has performed more than 1,000 pediatric liver transplants and 70 liver and intestine or multi-organ transplants in children.
"My position over the years is one where I'm in a situation where I can advocate for pediatric patients so they get their share of the organs," Reyes said, "but not just because we want the transplant for children but because we don't want children to be disadvantaged."
