Alabama NewsCenter — UAB’s HCV+ Organ Transplant Program Extends to Heart and Lung Patients

By Anna Jones

On the afternoon of April 25, 2018, Colin Tucker felt as though a railroad spike was being shoved through his chest.

Tucker was taken to his local hospital, where doctors found four blockages in his heart. He was having a heart attack, and 99% of the main artery that supplies blood to the largest portion of his heart was blocked. After months of unsuccessful treatments, procedures and medications, Tucker was sent to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he was placed on the transplant list and received a ventricular assist device (VAD) to pump blood from the chambers of his heart to the rest of his body.

Just over two years later, Tucker became the UAB Comprehensive Transplant Institute’s first heart-transplant recipient from a hepatitis C-positive donor. It is part of a new organ transplant program available at UAB where doctors safely transplant organs from hepatitis C-positive donors into uninfected recipients and cure the hepatitis C with antiviral therapy. The program originally began with liver and kidney transplants but has now expanded to include heart and lung transplants.

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