 And joining us now to talk about your health is Dr. Daniel Malouf, Director of the transplant program at the University of Maryland Medical Center and Professor of Surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Dr. thank you for being with us. At the top of the program we mentioned the milestone of one million transplants. It's incredible. It's over six decades, seven decades, right? It's incredible. Thank you, Jeff, for your question. Million transplants, it's incredible. If you think about it, the first kidney transplant was done in the 50s, early 50s, but the first liver transplant was done in the late 60s and the heart and lungs in the 80s. So here we are, 55 or 60 years later, with a million transplants. That is picked by the amount of work of health worker in this country, physician, nurses, and all the people involved in the family of transplantation. It won't take us another 60 years to get to the two million milestone. Oh, no, that will go much faster. In fact, I think that if you look at today, there is more than a hundred and five thousand people waiting for an organ and the number of transplants are growing every month thanks to technology, to innovation, and the allocation of organs. So I think that we're going to be much sooner than that. I think it's going to take a few years. It must be as a provider, as a physician, as a surgeon, an incredibly rewarding kind of medicine to practice. Can you make an immediate difference in somebody's life? Yes, it is. It is amazing to see patients coming to get the transplant very sick and see those patients living in a much better situation. And then, in fact, see them years later with these complete different people and complete different patients. And it is very rewarding. And you can see that in every transplant person in the country, they will talk about it. What procedures do you specialize in? So my expertise is liver, kidney, and pancreas transplant. My area of expertise, or my niche, is living donor liver transplantation, but I perform other surgeries. I'm involved here as a program director in a long and hard transplantation, too. So the University of Maryland has a comprehensive transplant center with transplant six organs. And it is also a center of innovation. One of the largest centers in the country. Folks may know that when you're transplanting a kidney, the good Lord gives us two of them, and you can work fine with one, right? But the liver, I've only got one. So how does that work? Well, here is a secret. The liver has this incredible capacity of regenerate. The liver, we can transplant half of the liver, and two months later, the liver will go back to normal size. So in both, on the donor, on the recipient. So that is why it's a technique that has been growing in the last few years, and provide organ for those patients they need, and we cannot, you know, that we cannot get from a deceased donor. So it is an amazing organ. I think the kidney, we had two, the liver, we have one, but has the capacity of regenerate. So it makes it very unique. You mentioned the backlog of people, more than 100,000 people who are waiting a life-saving transplant. How many transplants are coming from living donors as opposed to deceased donors? The right. It's dependent on the organ. In kidney transplant, about 30% of the patients receive an organ from a live donor. In liver, we are growing, but I think it's about 5% to 6% in the U.S., in countries like in Japan, or in Turkey, or in Korea that they don't have the option of deceased donor. Living donor liver transplant is more than 90% of the techniques that they use. So we are learning. We are growing on that, and I think that is a great innovative approach to decrease the number of patients in need of transplant. Living donors, typically family members, I guess. Typically, but not necessarily. They can be friends. People find donors in church. They have to share blood types sometimes. So not necessarily family, but we see about 70% of the donors are family related. Maryland has been famous and pioneering in, I think it's called, paired transplants, where you may be in need and you may have a donor, but the donor isn't a match for you, but it's a match for somebody over here who has a donor, but that person isn't a match for you and you bring in a third party. It gets very complicated, but you're able to help a lot of people. Absolutely. We, University of Maryland, you say, we do SWAP, which you have a donor and your donor is not a match for you, but it's a match for somebody else in the list. So we SWAP those couples, but we also do it through the NKR, and we also do it through a match grid, which is a program that helps us to not just inside University of Maryland, but also with some colleagues and other institutions around the area in the country. How close does a match have to be these days? And has that changed over time? That is a great point. It has changed a lot over time. We have better immunosuppression, better medication to treat rejection. So that has changed tremendously in the last few years. The outcomes and the improvement in the outcomes is even despite the difference in the matching. So it had to be some match, and it's different in organs. kidney, for example, needs closer match, liver is more open. So we can make that improvement. We see that improvement every year. Let's take a phone call from Montgomery County. This is Phil. Phil, thanks for the call. Go ahead. Hello. I'd like to know if there's an age limit on people who are able to donate. And I'm 78 and I have mild diabetes. Could I donate an organ? Great question. Thank you for the call. Phil, that's a great question. We have frequently that question. And thank you for thinking about being a donor, Phil. Depending, I would say that for kidney, if you have a good kidney function, we are considering older donors for liver because the liver needs the capacity of regenerating. Usually when you go above 65, we try to prevent using those donors for your safety. But yes, so you could be considered as a donor for kidney, I would say. What are you working on now? You spend time operating, of course. But in terms of enlarging the, growing the ability for people to get transplants and have successful transplants in all different parts of our community. What are the priorities? How are you addressing them? Yes, so transplants have been living through the last 10 years. Like medicine in general, the incredible innovation and the specialty. We are working in several areas to increase what is called increased donor pool. Some of the areas is living donor, as you mentioned, and we are growing living donor. But also some technology like senotransplantation, as you know, University of Medina. That was the pig, right? Right. But that's using animals, genetically modifying animals to transplant humans. Is it the future? Tell us what was learned from that procedure where a man with heart failure was given a pig's heart in the first of its kind operation. We've been talking about senotransplantation for more than 30 years. If you asked me 30 or 40 years ago, I would say I don't know about that. But now I think that it could be the future. I think that definitely what technology has changed is that now we can do gene editing. And the CRISPR technology allows us to change some genes in the organs that prevent the organ to reject in the human. We never could before cross organs from different species. But now because we can modify those genes, we can actually do that. So heart was done. I think that we continue to, it will continue growing. Kidney has been done temporarily, especially in New York and Alabama, and we are moving forward to do the next senotransplant. So yes, it's the future. What do you want people to know about signing up as a donor? When you're getting your driver's license or they're asking you to check the box that if God forbid someday you were in an accident, you would be a donor. What should people know about that? I want you to know that I am an organ donor in my driver's license. I think if you have a loved one that needs an organ, then you learn the importance on to being an organ donor. I think that people need to understand that nobody will harvest any organ if the family don't approve. So this is the first step. Putting your donor wish in the driver's license is the first step. Your health segments are a co-production of Maryland Public Television and the University of Maryland Medical System.