A group of doctors from the Samsung Medical Center have succeeded in transplanting liver cells into a one-month old baby suffering from a congenital metabolic disease, making the baby the youngest to go under the knife in the country.
 
Doctors Lee Suk-koo and Lee Sang-hoon, who are experts in pediatric surgery in the Samsung Medical Center’s Organ Transplant Center and doctors, Jin Dong-kyu and Cho Sung-yoon, who are experts in pediatrics, said on Thursday that they carried out the operation last December.
 
The surgery involved transplanting liver cells extracted from a brain-dead infant who was only two weeks old into a baby girl suffering from carbamoyl phosphate synthetase deficiency(CPSD) which is a type of congenital metabolic disease. At the time of the surgery, the baby girl was just one month old.
 
The hospital said the baby girl was recently discharged from the hospital after a three-month stay as most of her physiological function was back to normal, including her ammonia levels.