(Press-News.org) A team of Mount Sinai surgeons has performed the first heart-liver-kidney triple organ transplants in New York. They successfully completed two of these complex surgeries on patients from Westchester County, who have since returned home and are making full recoveries.
Heart-liver-kidney transplants are extremely rare—only 58 have been done across the country since the United Network for Organ Sharing, the government agency that oversees transplantation, started tracking cases in 1987. The two procedures at The Mount Sinai Hospital, which took place on January 10 and March 8, were among only four to date in the entire United States in 2025.
One of the Mount Sinai cases was the first heart-liver-kidney transplant in New York State, and took place in January of this year. That procedure gave the patient a second transplanted heart in addition to a liver and kidney transplant, one of only a handful of cases of its kind that have been performed in the country.
The extraordinarily high-risk and complex 22-hour operation was led by Anelechi Anyanwu, MD, Vice Chair of the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery for the Mount Sinai Health System, and Sander S. Florman, MD, the Charles Miller, MD Professor of Surgery and Director of the Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute at Mount Sinai.
Drs. Anyanwu and Florman also led the second heart-liver-kidney transplant in March of this year.
“The coordination between our abdominal and thoracic medical and surgical teams was seamless—and the anesthesia expertise required to perform these transplants was critical,” says Dr. Florman. “An amazing tour de force for this patient!”
The patient, a 64-year-old man from Peekskill, New York, had previously undergone a heart transplant at The Mount Sinai Hospital in 2002 for complications of sarcoidosis, an autoimmune disease which can damage the heart muscle. After two healthy decades with the transplant, he developed chronic rejection of the transplanted heart. He also developed deteriorating kidney and liver function, a common complication of long-standing heart disease and anti-rejection medication. He was hospitalized in December 2024 with severe heart failure and rapidly declining kidney and liver function and needed three new organs to survive. His condition took a turn for the worse just after Christmas, and on December 30, he underwent emergency surgery to have artificial heart pumps (ventricular assist devices) implanted to keep him alive until a suitable donor was identified. Two weeks later, he had the successful triple organ transplant, and is now thriving with no complications.
“It is incredible to see how much better our patient feels and looks in a short period of time,” adds Noah Moss, MD, an advanced heart failure and transplant cardiologist at Mount Sinai who has cared for the patient for nearly a decade. “He describes that his activities of daily living are much easier to perform and he has returned to work where he volunteers for his community, and is already planning his next family vacation.”
The other triple-transplant case involved a 45-year old from Ossining, New York, who received a new heart, liver, and kidney as the result of a severe cardiomyopathy diagnosis. He had multiple complications during a hospitalization for an extreme episode of heart failure in 2024, which left him with end-stage kidney disease requiring dialysis and some scarring of his liver. He was admitted to the hospital in February 2025 with worsening heart failure and was listed for heart and kidney transplantation; at the time, his liver function was marginal but adequate. Because of worsening heart failure and cardiogenic shock—when the body organs are not receiving enough blood and oxygen to maintain their vital functions—he needed two emergency artificial heart pumps to keep his heart functioning and keep him alive until a donor was identified. By then, his liver function had deteriorated and he was dying of liver failure. He was emergently listed for a liver transplant and several days later, underwent the successful triple transplant and made a rapid turnaround. The procedure took place on March 18 and he went home less than a month later after making a full recovery.
These cases exemplify Mount Sinai’s success involving its organ transplant programs and complex multidisciplinary teams. They have a remarkable track record, performing 6 pancreas, 10 intestine, 25 lung, 51 heart, 178 liver, and 270 kidney transplants in 2024, with excellent outcomes.
About the Mount Sinai Health System
Mount Sinai Health System is one of the largest academic medical systems in the New York metro area, with 48,000 employees working across seven hospitals, more than 400 outpatient practices, more than 600 research and clinical labs, a school of nursing, and a leading school of medicine and graduate education. Mount Sinai advances health for all people, everywhere, by taking on the most complex health care challenges of our time—discovering and applying new scientific learning and knowledge; developing safer, more effective treatments; educating the next generation of medical leaders and innovators; and supporting local communities by delivering high-quality care to all who need it.
Through the integration of its hospitals, labs, and schools, Mount Sinai offers comprehensive health care solutions from birth through geriatrics, leveraging innovative approaches such as artificial intelligence and informatics while keeping patients’ medical and emotional needs at the center of all treatment. The Health System includes approximately 9,000 primary and specialty care physicians and 11 free-standing joint-venture centers throughout the five boroughs of New York City, Westchester, Long Island, and Florida. Hospitals within the System are consistently ranked by Newsweek’s® “The World’s Best Smart Hospitals, Best in State Hospitals, World Best Hospitals and Best Specialty Hospitals” and by U.S. News & World Report's® “Best Hospitals” and “Best Children’s Hospitals.” The Mount Sinai Hospital is on the U.S. News & World Report® “Best Hospitals” Honor Roll for 2024-2025.
For more information, visit https://www.mountsinai.org or find Mount Sinai on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.
END
Mount Sinai surgeons perform first heart-liver-kidney transplants in New York State
2025-05-20
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
‘Sharkitecture:’ A nanoscale look inside a blacktip shark’s skeleton
2025-05-20
Sharks have been evolving for more than 450 million years, developing skeletons not from bone, but from a tough, mineralized form of cartilage. These creatures are more than just fast swimmers – they’re built for efficiency. Their spines act like natural springs, storing and releasing energy with each tailbeat, allowing them to move through the water with smooth, powerful grace.
Now, scientists are peering inside shark skeletons at the nanoscale, revealing a microscopic “sharkitecture” that helps these ancient apex predators withstand extreme physical demands of constant motion.
Using synchrotron X-ray nanotomography with detailed ...
Public opinion on who should do content moderation
2025-05-20
Americans perceive small juries of content experts as the most legitimate moderators of potentially misleading content on social media, according to a survey, but perceive large, nationally representative or politically balanced juries with minimum knowledge qualifications as comparably legitimate. Social media content moderation policies tend to attract criticism, with some calling for more aggressive removal of harmful and misleading content and others decrying moderation as censorship and accusing expert moderators of being politically biased. Less clear is what the general public would like to see in terms of content ...
Accounting for marine ecosystems in China promises greater environmental and economic sustainability
2025-05-20
A Perspective proposes a pathway to improvements in sustainability of marine ecosystems and resources in China. Based on environmental accounting used in China’s terrestrial ecosystems, the approach would implement policy and governance to ensure accountability for sustainable use of marine systems. Laurence J. McCook and colleagues argue that the ecosystem goods and services provided to the nation by oceans and coastal ecosystems—including seagrass beds, salt marshes, coral reefs, and mangrove forests—are ...
Diabetes drug gives hope for new treatment for prostate cancer
2025-05-20
A drug used to treat type 2 diabetes may also be effective in slowing the progression of prostate cancer. This is shown by an international study in which researchers at Umeå University, Sweden, have participated. The researchers have found that drugs that regulate a particular protein have a key role in reducing prostate cancer recurrence among diabetic patients.
"This is a significant discovery. For the first time, we have clinical observations showing that prostate cancer patients with diabetes who received drugs targeting the protein remained relapse-free during the period we followed them," ...
New US dementia cases in decline, but continued rise in people living with the condition
2025-05-20
New cases of dementia in the United States declined from 2015 to 2021, but the number of people living with the condition continued to rise due to population ageing, with nearly 2.9 million traditional Medicare beneficiaries (around 12%) living with a dementia diagnosis in 2021, finds a study published by The BMJ today.
What’s more, a greater burden of dementia was seen in marginalized and low resource communities, highlighting the importance of policy approaches to promote equitable dementia care, say the ...
Doctors group asks National Institutes of Health to investigate Arizona State University for research misconduct
2025-05-20
TEMPE, Ariz. — The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine filed a complaint with the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare today, May 19, 2025, asking for an investigation of Arizona State University’s use of animals to study the effects of dietary supplements on adults with Down syndrome.
“Arizona State University cannot justify its use of mice to study a common nutrient that could be easily and ethically studied in consenting human volunteers,” the complaint says. “These uses of animals run afoul of the ...
St. Jude scientist Charles Mullighan elected to the Royal Society of London
2025-05-20
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital leukemia researcher Charles G. Mullighan, MBBS (Hons), MSc, MD, senior deputy director of the St. Jude Comprehensive Cancer Center, has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.
Mullighan was selected to join the Royal Society for his trailblazing contributions to genomic research, which have advanced the understanding, diagnosis and treatment of acute leukemia, notably childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia ...
1.5°C Paris Climate Agreement target too high for polar ice sheets and sea level rise
2025-05-20
Efforts to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5°C under the Paris Climate Agreement may not go far enough to save the world’s ice sheets, according to a new study.
Research led by Durham University, UK, suggests the target should instead be closer to 1°C to avoid significant losses from the polar ice sheets and prevent a further acceleration in sea level rise.
The team reviewed a wealth of evidence to examine the effect that the 1.5°C target would have on the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, which together store enough ice to raise global sea levels by almost 65 metres.
The mass of ice lost from these ice ...
Scientists discover potential new targets for Alzheimer’s drugs
2025-05-20
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- By combining information from many large datasets, MIT researchers have identified several new potential targets for treating or preventing Alzheimer’s disease.
The study revealed genes and cellular pathways that haven’t been linked to Alzheimer’s before, including one involved in DNA repair. Identifying new drug targets is critical because many of the Alzheimer’s drugs that have been developed to this point haven’t been as successful as hoped.
Working with researchers at Harvard Medical School, the team used data from humans and fruit flies to identify cellular pathways linked to neurodegeneration. ...
Scientists develop new treatment with potential to tackle commonest form of childhood cancer
2025-05-20
A combination of two drugs could improve outcomes and reduce the need for toxic chemotherapy for B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (B-ALL), the commonest cancer in childhood and one that can be particularly difficult to treat in older patients, according to Cambridge scientists.
Although the research has so far only been conducted in cell lines and mice, the team is seeking funding to begin clinical trials in patients shortly.
More than 500 people a year in the UK are diagnosed with B-ALL, many of whom are children, where it makes up 40% of all ...