WASHINGTON — In what medical officials say is a first, the bullet-scarred pancreas from a service member who was shot in Afghanistan was flown from Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington to the University of Miami, where insulin-producing cells were salvaged from the organ and flown back to be dropped into the man’s liver.
Three weeks later, a jubilant surgical team announced Tuesday that the transplanted cells are producing insulin and Airman Tre F. Porfirio, 21, of St. Marys, Ga., was feeling good enough to meet the University of Miami surgeon whose team spent six hours before dawn on Thanksgiving isolating the cells from the ravaged pancreas.
“It’s an operation we would have done for anyone, but for someone who is putting his life on the line for all of us, I couldn’t think of a better way to spend Thanksgiving,” said Dr. Camillo Ricordi, the chief of the University of Miami medical school’s Diabetes Research Institute, who developed the method for isolating the cells from the pancreas.
The procedure is the first known case of transplanting insulin-producing cells after a severe trauma and the first time that such a transplant has been conducted remotely, in an emergency situation. Ricordi said he hoped that it could lead to near-cures for people who were facing diabetes, which Porfirio would have faced without a functioning pancreas.
“This could become an unlimited cure available for everyone,” Ricordi said.
