Hepatitis C, in general, affects the liver predominantly, and in the absence of good treatment, it can cause liver damage, liver cirrhosis, and may cause, as well, liver cancer. In the transplant community, we've been thinking outside the box. We are trying to deliver transplant to more patients. Despite some record number of transplants over the past two years, the number of people needing transplant continues to increase, and we are not meeting the demand.

With that in mind and thinking about expanding the donor pool, we thought of accepting donors from people with hepatitis C infection. We put in place a system so that the treatment can be initiated promptly after transplant so that we can achieve the cure within the shortest period possible.

Fast forward now over the past two years. More than 200 lives were saved using those organs. The power of the Mayo Clinic enterprise, with three transplant centers, has been able to show that those organs can be used safely.

The patients were treated promptly after transplant, and every patient was cured from that infection. That's really the experience that we had so far, and it clearly has allowed us to expand the donor pool and the liver transplant to a lot of patients who are in urgent need for transplantation.

Expanding the donor pool and accepting hepatitis C-positive donors in patients awaiting liver transplant, we decided to expand that to other organs, including kidney, heart, and lung transplantation as well. And we adopted the same practice. We combined the effective antiviral therapy with a lipid-lowering agent that we thought will help prevent the hepatitis C from entering into the cells.

That combination was given to the recipient before they go to surgery, where they are accepting a liver from somebody with hepatitis C. And rather than treating for 12 weeks, we treated for only one week. So the recipient was treated with eight days. We have been able to prevent and cure the infection in 100% of those recipients with only eight days of therapy compared to the 12 weeks of therapy that we have used previously.

We have adopted this practice in recipients of non-liver solid organ transplant recipients, but we are working on research to adopt the same preemptive strategy in recipients of liver transplant from donors with chronic hepatitis C. We are not only using antiviral therapy, but we are combining antiviral therapy with the lipid-lowering agent.

That lipid-lowering agent, combined with the antiviral therapy, is preventing the hepatitis C from entering into the recipient cells. Being a leader in the transplant field and having converged protocol across the enterprise clearly is giving us the ability to conduct research in the field of transplantation.