June 17 marks the 80th anniversary of the birth of the head of the Sklifosovsky Research Institute of Emergency Medicine, the chief transplant doctor of Moscow, Mogily Kubotya. The day before, Moscow Evening spoke to him about the present and future of organ transplantation.
Mogili Šalvovich Khbutia began his career as a pediatrician. I started working immediately after graduating from the Faculty of Pediatrics at the Gorky State Medical Institute named after S. M. Kirov. Therefore, the first question was devoted to choosing the specialization.
— Mogeli Šalvovich Why did you ultimately choose a transplant?
– In fact, everything is very simple. After graduating from the institute, where my wife and I studied, we were sent to Tajikistan. Then there was a distribution, you had to work for three years, otherwise you wouldn’t get a job anywhere. She started working in a maternity hospital and became a pediatrician. It was the Central District Hospital, and I was a regular police officer there. To be honest, I didn’t really like this job. I was more interested in surgery, so I retrained as a pediatric surgeon with Professor Bulatov in Dushanbe.
Three years later, my wife and I came to Moscow, and I took up residency at the Institute of Organ Transplantation. My mentor was Valery Ivanovich Shumakov, who saw the future in heart transplantation for terminally ill patients. He used to transplant hearts into calves every day, and I used to go with him to these operations. Ultimately, she also believed that the future lay in replacing a diseased organ through a transplant. That’s how I became a transplant doctor. And then he participated in the first successful heart transplant in 1987, after which Valery Ivanovich said that he wanted his student, that is, me, to write the first thesis on heart transplantation. It took two years.
— Under your leadership, Sklif has become the leading center for organ transplantation in Russia. How did you manage to achieve this?
“When I came to Sklif and studied his work, I realized that this was not just a hospital, but a machine working around the clock. He had all the main and highly specialized departments, his own laboratory, the most modern equipment even at that time. If the Department of Organ Transplantation was created, it would be only in a multidisciplinary clinic. Because the transplantation operation is performed by surgeons, but cardiologists, immunologists, hematologists, psychologists and many other specialists are involved in the preparation and rehabilitation. At that time, Moscow organ transplantation did not exist at all, but thanks to the fact that Skliv has all areas Medicine has received such rapid development.
— How has transplantation progressed in the past 20 years?
– A lot has changed during this time. New types of organ transplants have appeared, for example, limbs, faces, uteruses (by the way, there is more than one case when a healthy child was born). It is in the world. If we talk about Moscow, then we have started transplanting lungs, small intestines and limbs. I would like to point out that we also perform multiple organ transplants for one person at once. This is rare, but it does happen in our practice.
— What organs have you not yet learned how to transplant, and do you think we will learn?
— I am often asked about a head transplant: is it possible? It is possible, but not necessary, because if you transplant the head, the heart will not beat, and no organ will be able to function. We have not yet learned how to connect the spinal cord to the medulla oblongata and the head, so that commands are given correctly from top to bottom.
– But in the future will it become real?
– I think yes. After all, just a century ago we thought it was impossible to touch the heart, but today we already perform organ transplants as a routine procedure. The era of development of artificial intelligence and robotics is making itself felt. But the most important thing is that work is underway on stem cells, thanks to which it will be possible to grow a new organ for a specific person from his own cells. I’m sure this will be a huge breakthrough in science.
– Which organ transplants are the most difficult?
— It all depends on the characteristics of the human body. Sometimes, the simplest process at first glance can become complicated. But a lung transplant may still be one of the most difficult operations.
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Mogili Shalfovich Kubotya was born in 1946 in the city of Sukhumi. In 1971 he graduated from the Gorky Medical Institute named after S. M. Kirov. In 2017, he was appointed to the position of President of the Sklifosovsky Research Institute, which he previously headed. He was awarded the Russian Government Prize in the field of science and technology.