Like most mornings, Thiago Beduschi, M.D., spent it in the OR, performing a liver transplant.
Unlike most mornings, this liver transplant was UF Health’s 2,000th–accounting for 2,000 lives saved at UF Health’s transplant center.
Beduschi is one of the many reasons UF Health is on its way to becoming a multiorgan transplant hub, and why patients like Allen Korson and Clayton Barber were able to receive inaugural double- and triple-organ surgeries at UF Health.
A recent addition to the division of transplantation and hepatobiliary surgery and a professor in the UF College of Medicine’s surgery department, Beduschi is one of a few experts around the world in multiviscerals and other types of multiorgan transplants.
Admittedly, he does play favorites. His fascination with the liver began at the Lutheran University medical school in the south of Brazil.
“I fell in love with its anatomy,” Beduschi said. “It’s a vital, complex and essential organ.”
Every summer vacation, he would make the 15-hour drive to participate in an observership at a transplant center in São Paulo, home to the largest liver transplant center Brazil had ever seen.
“My first day there I watched a living donor transplant,” Beduschi recalled. “Since then, I haven’t wanted to do anything else.”
Years later, he’s also become an expert in kidney, pancreas, intestine and multivisceral transplant surgeries. Luckily for Korson and Barber, the liver remains Beduschi’s specialty.
Now, Beduschi and team continue to surpass the national average for waitlist mortality and have one of the highest survival rates of all liver transplant programs in the nation.