Best Liver Transplant Surgeon In India

Liver transplantation is a complicated surgical procedure that requires precision, skill, and expertise. There are very few liver transplantation specialists who are world renowned for the number of successful liver transplantation outcomes. One of the names that is famous in this field is Prof. Mohamed Rela, who is considered the benchmark when it comes to liver transplantation and hepatopancreatobiliary (HPB) surgery. Prof. Rela, who has garnered his reputation for being the best liver transplant surgeon in India as well as in the world, has many achievements to his credit and many successful surgeries to his repertoire, but perhaps the most remarkable surgeries performed by Prof. Rela, which garnered him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records, is the liver transplantation surgery on a 5-day old baby.

Beginning his prolific career, Prof. Rela worked in various hospitals in the United Kingdom before joining London’s King’s College Hospital in 1991, where he continues to be the Professor of liver surgery. Niche areas of liver transplantation like auxiliary transplantation, split liver transplantation techniques and live donor liver transplantation were pioneered by him at the King’s College for the world to emulate, and scores of patients to benefit. In a glittering career spanning over 3 decades, Prof. Rela has performed over 4500 liver transplants. Rela is also an expert hepatobiliary surgeon, performing Whipple’s surgery for pancreatic cancer, liver resections for Cholangiocarcinoma and HCC resection in Cirrhotic patients. His research interest is in the field of clinical liver transplantation, translational studies into liver regeneration and liver preservation. He has over 600 publications in peer-reviewed journals. Furthermore, he has been honoured with Doctorate of Science degrees from three universities, recognising his service to healthcare. He has also been voted as one of the 20 Most Innovative Paediatric Surgeons Alive Today.

Prof. Rela’s list of achievements further includes:

• In March 1999, he carried out the first living related liver transplant on a patient with acute liver failure in the UK. 18-month-old Luke Bettelley, was given just 48 hours to live before the operation.[18]
• In June 2003, he successfully performed a liver transplant for a four-and-a-half-year-old girl from Ahmedabad, Pranali Bhat, suffering from a terminal stage liver disease.
• In August 2003, he was a part of a team, which did liver transplant(s) six times for a patient to save her life by performing a bone marrow transplant.
• In August 2004, a team led by him has successfully conducted the liver transplantation for a five-year-old Pakistani girl, Batul Hasan.
• In September 2009, a team led by him successfully performed the split liver transplantation (first of its kind in India). The liver was split during the retrieval operation into a smaller left lobe for transplanting a young girl and a larger right lobe for transplanting an older woman with end stage liver disease.
• In May 2011, a team led by him has successfully done Swap liver transplantation on Adults (first of its kind in India)
• In 2011, he envisaged the “Master Class in Liver Disease’ (MCLD) series as a means to deliver high quality teaching in liver disease and transplantation. MCLD has quickly established itself as one of the most popular scientific meetings in the field in the Indian sub-continent. Each edition is planned as a single theme conference with participation of national & international experts.

With ideas to dedicate his life toward helping liver patients find answers for their problems, Prof. Rela started the Rela Hospital in Chennai, India, where he set up a successful Living Donor Liver Transplant program performing over 250 liver transplants a year. He is also the catalyst in starting liver transplants in tier 2 cities in Tamil Nadu, providing access to such high-end medical facilities even to people from far flung places. Rela Hospital is acknowledged to be an international medical facility and a quaternary care hospital dedicated to fostering and responding to the needs of a diverse set of patients. The hospital is committed to being an internationally significant health care system with the state-of- the- art infrastructure with the best liver transplant surgeon in India at its helm.