Mangaluru (The Hindu): Kidney harvested from a brain dead person in Udupi on March 22 has been successfully transplanted in a 25-year-old woman of Mangaluru at the Yenepoya Medical College here.

This was the first time that an organ harvested in Udupi was transplanted in a recipient in the city.

Chief Nephrologist of the college Santosh Pai said that the organ was transplanted within five hours from the time it was retrieved from Purushotham Naik, a fisherman from Bhatkal.

Mr. Naik was declared brain dead at the Kasturba Hospital in Manipal after he failed to recover from a severe injury in a motor vehicle accident. Two kidneys and a liver were harvested. While one of the kidneys was made available for transplantation for a patient at the Kasturba Hospital there, another was sent to the Yenepoya Hospital. The liver was transported to Columbia Hospital (Yeshwantpur) in Bengaluru.

Dr. Pai said that the 25-year-old recipient was third among the list of persons registered with the Zonal Coordination Committee of Karnataka for kidney. As the matching test failed for the first two, the committee decided to grant the kidney to the woman as it matched with what she required. The team comprising Mujeeburahiman, Nischith D’Souza, Althaf Khan, Dr. Pai, Padmanabha Bhat, Ramamurthy and Shruthi operated on the woman and transplanted the kidney. Dr. Pai said that the recipient had been on dialysis for the past four years and she did not have suitable donor in the family.

This was the first time that an organ harvested in Udupi was transplanted in a recipient in the city