Liver transplant pioneer to deliver Shumway Lecture
Dr. Norman Shumway
Sir Roy Calne will discuss his pioneering work in the field of liver transplantation and transplant tolerance during a special lecture sponsored by the Vanderbilt Transplant Center on Friday, Feb. 27.
Dr. Calne's research of the powerful immunosuppressant drug cyclosporin in the 1970s helped revolutionize the field of transplantation.
He will deliver the fifth annual Shumway Lecture, "Tolerance, from the Laboratory to the Clinic," at 4 p.m. The lecture will be in Room 208 Light Hall on the Vanderbilt University Medical Center campus.
"Sir Calne is a primary pioneer of liver transplantation and is largely responsible for the field of transplantation such that it is in the world today," said Dr. C. Wright Pinson, professor and vice chairman of Surgery, surgical director of the Vanderbilt Transplant Center and director of the Liver Transplant Program.
"We are very pleased and proud to have someone of Sir Calne's caliber and reputation visit VUMC to discuss his influential work. It is truly an honor to have him."
The Shumway Lecture is an annual visiting professorship program, hosted by the Vanderbilt Transplant Center to honor Dr. Norman E. Shumway for his contributions to heart transplantation research, experimentation and surgery.
Shumway, a 1949 graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, is Frances and Charles D. Field Professor in Cardiothoracic Surgery at Stanford University, where he began studies on cardiac transplantation in 1958.
Shumway and his colleagues also introduced the first clinical application of combined heart-lung transplantation in 1981, and he has consistently contributed to other aspects of cardiac surgery, with more than 450 publications in the field.
Calne, professor of Surgery at Cambridge University, began his research in organ transplantation in 1959 at the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
During this period, he described the first effective immunosuppression for kidney transplantation, which he developed further as a Harkness Fellow at Harvard Medical School in 1960-61. The approach was applied to patients in 1962.
Calne established the Cambridge kidney transplantation program in 1965 and the first European liver transplantation program in 1968. In 1978, Calne conducted the first use of the then-new potent immunosuppressant medication cyclosporin. The drug is now a cornerstone of immunosuppression that makes the success of organ transplantation possible.
The following year, Calne performed the first pancreas transplant in the United Kingdom. In 1992, he performed the country's first intestinal transplant.
A fellow of the Royal Society and a Knight Bachelor, Calne has also served as president of the International Transplantation Society.