Seoul National University Hospital announced Wednesday that it completed its 3,000th cumulative liver transplant on January 5. The milestone comes 38 years after the hospital performed South Korea's first successful liver transplant in March 1988.
Liver transplantation is virtually the only curative treatment for patients with end-stage liver disease. The procedure is divided into two types: living donor liver transplantation, where a portion of a living person's liver is removed and transplanted to the patient, and deceased donor liver transplantation, where the liver is donated from a deceased person. In South Korea, living donor transplants account for a significantly higher proportion due to insufficient brain-dead organ donations. The procedure carries the inherent burden of ensuring donor safety, while surgical difficulty continues to increase due to an aging patient population and rising cases of advanced hepatocellular carcinoma. Liver transplantation represents a high-difficulty medical field requiring comprehensive care from pre- and post-operative precision evaluations to immunosuppression management, complication response, and long-term follow-up.
Over the past decade, 50% of liver transplants performed at Seoul National University Hospital involved cirrhosis patients with hepatocellular carcinoma, with approximately 15-20% of those cases involving advanced hepatocellular carcinoma. ABO-incompatible transplants between recipients and donors with different blood types accounted for 20-25% of cases. Over the past five years, re-transplantation comprised approximately 7% of all cases, including patients who had previously received liver transplants at other medical institutions. Seoul National University Hospital performs 18.8% of all pediatric liver transplants conducted nationwide.
Despite the high proportion of high-risk patients, the hospital has maintained stable treatment outcomes. The one-year survival rate for hepatocellular carcinoma patients after liver transplantation was 92%. Long-term follow-up of cirrhosis patients showed a 10-year survival rate of approximately 80%. The success rate for living donor liver transplant surgery improved from 95.1% in the first 1,000 cases to 98.1% in the most recent 1,000 cases.
"This achievement is the result of accumulated clinical experience combined with a standardized multidisciplinary care system involving surgery, gastroenterology, radiology, anesthesiology and pain medicine, and critical care medicine," the hospital said. Seoul National University Hospital maintains consistent pre-transplant evaluation and post-operative management protocols. Immunosuppression adjustment, complication response, and long-term follow-up management are also operated according to standardized protocols.
The hospital has also continued to achieve milestones in minimally invasive liver transplantation. In 2017, Seoul National University Hospital became the first single institution worldwide to complete 100 cases of pure laparoscopic donor hepatectomy, later expanding to 300 cases. In 2021, the hospital performed the world's first minimally invasive living donor liver transplant recipient surgery. Currently, 100% of all living donor liver transplant surgeries are performed laparoscopically. The laparoscopic approach, which reduces the incision size, can lower post-operative pain and recovery burden, carrying significant implications for donor safety.
"Reaching 3,000 liver transplants goes beyond a simple surgical count—it represents the accumulated results of Seoul National University Hospital's care system that has continuously treated high-difficulty, severe liver disease patients," said Professor Lee Kwang-woong of the Division of Hepatobiliary and Pancreatic Surgery. "We will continue to advance minimally invasive liver transplant surgery and develop a treatment system that prioritizes donor safety above all else to elevate the standard of liver transplantation to the next level."