The operation was made possible by the organ donation of a 42-year-old woman admitted to Viet Duc University Hospital on March 11 after a serious traffic accident. Despite intensive treatment, she was declared brain-dead, and her family agreed to donate her organs.
According to the hospital's director, Duong Duc Hung, surgeons retrieved the donor’s heart, liver, two kidneys and several tissues for transplantation.
One of the most complex cases involved a 53-year-old man with hereditary amyloidosis, a rare disorder in which abnormal protein deposits damage multiple organs, particularly the heart. Doctors performed a simultaneous heart-liver transplant on March 13, a procedure rarely undertaken worldwide due to its technical demands.
After about seven hours of surgery, the transplanted heart began beating immediately, while the new liver quickly produced bile, indicating good early function.
In another breakthrough, doctors applied the domino transplant technique for the first time in Vietnam. Although the amyloidosis patient’s liver carried a genetic mutation, its structure and function remained largely normal.
Instead of discarding the organ, surgeons transplanted it into a 64-year-old man with liver cancer, whose survival prospects were otherwise extremely limited.
The domino liver transplant lasted about six hours and was conducted alongside other procedures by multiple surgical teams working simultaneously. Both recipients showed positive recovery, remaining conscious and able to sit up and eat within 72 hours.
Doctors said the case demonstrated how a single donor can save multiple lives, moving beyond the traditional one donor-one recipient model.
They noted that while there is a potential long-term risk of disease in the domino liver recipient, it could take 20-30 years to develop and is not inevitable. By contrast, patients with advanced liver cancer often survive only months without transplantation.
The success highlights Vietnam’s growing medical capacity, with increasingly complex procedures and improved coordination helping to position Viet Duc University Hospital among the region’s leading transplant centres.
