Bruno Reichart

Bruno Reichart

Bruno Reichart (born January 18, 1943 in Vienna ) is a German heart surgeon and university professor. He achieved the first heart-lung transplant in Germany in 1983. From 1984 to 1990 he was a professor at the University of Cape Town. Then he was professor for cardiac surgery at the Ludwig Maximilians University.

Life

Reichart grew up in Ingolstadt and attended the Christoph-Scheiner-Gymnasium there . After graduating from high school, he studied medicine at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen and the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . In 1968 he received his doctorate summa cum laude in Munich with a hematological doctoral thesis . He completed the two-year medical assistant period in gynecology , surgery and internal medicine at the LMU. In 1971 he switched to Rudolf Zenker , who was then professor of surgery in Munich, as an assistant . As part of the internal rotation, Reichart started in cardiac surgery two months later . He never left this specialist area. After a time as an assistant to Werner Klinner , he worked in Memphis (Tennessee) at the Baptist Memorial Hospital and in Palo Alto, California at Stanford University with Norman Shumway in the early 1970s . In 1977 Reichart became senior physician at LMU's cardiac surgery department. His habilitation in 1978 was followed by an appointment as professor at the LMU in 1980 . In 2011 he retired.

Bruno Reichart at the Großhadern Clinic controlling a surgical robot, 1999

Reichart performed his first heart transplant in 1981 at the Großhadern Clinic . By 1984 he transplanted 23 donor hearts there. On February 13, 1983, Reichart was the first in Germany to have heart and lungs implanted. The heart-lung operation was technically successful, but the patient later died of liver and kidney failure. The second attempt on May 29, 1984 was more successful, in which the patient survived the operation for about five years.

In the same year, Reichart accepted the call to the University of Cape Town , which was considered a liberal bastion against the apartheid regime in South Africa . At the suggestion of Christiaan Barnard , the pioneer of heart transplantation, Reichart took over the management of the surgical departments for heart and lung diseases at the Groote Schuur Hospital and the Red-Cross Children's Hospital in September 1984 , where he continued his heart-lung program. During this time he also dealt scientifically with the preservation of lungs and the diagnosis of lung rejection.

In January 1990 Reichart returned to Großhadern as full professor of cardiac surgery at the Munich University Hospital. In addition to the successful children's heart surgery with a reference center for children's heart transplants, he also set up a heart surgery department for adults in the neighboring Augustinum , a teaching hospital of the LMU. In 1993 Reichart was the first in Europe to insert a fully implantable partial artificial heart (Novacor) into a young man , which enabled a waiting period of a few weeks before a human heart was transplanted. The patient survived until 2005. Another high point was the first heart-lung-liver transplant in 1997. The patient lives to this day.

Reichart has been researching xenotransplantation scientifically since 1992 and worked on its development for the Bavarian Research Foundation from 1998 to 2004 . From 2004 to 2012, Reichart was director of the Collaborative Research Center for Xenotransplantation of the German Research Foundation (DFG). In addition, he devoted himself to improving thoracic transplantation with new immunosuppressants and was in charge of lung transplantation in Großhadern until 2011. He is currently researching primarily the transplantation of tissues and organs obtained from pigs, which he and his staff see as a way of counteracting the serious shortage of donor organs in the future. Since 2012 Reichart has been the coordinator of the transregional DFG collaborative research center for "Biology of Xenogenic Cell and Organ Transplantation".

In his research on the transplantation of pig hearts into baboons, he was able to overcome various hurdles. While assessing transplant centers in Sweden, he found a method to bypass the cooling of donor hearts from pigs prior to transplantation, as a special nutrient solution was sometimes used instead of cooling. The pig hearts were particularly sensitive to cooling. Another problem was that the pigs' hearts kept growing in the baboons, which could be suppressed by switching to an immunosuppressive drug, also used as a cancer therapy, where it suppressed tumor growth.

From 1989 to 1990 Reichart was President of the International Society for Heart Transplantation , from 2000 to 2012 Treasurer of the German Transplantation Society and a member of the Standing Commission for Organ Transplantation of the German Medical Association .

Reichart was visiting professor in Boston (1978), Birmingham (1978), Milwaukee (1979), Paris (1980) and Stanford / California (1980, 1981 and 1982).

Reichart has been married to the journalist Elke Dietrich since 1985 and lives in Leutstetten . In 1987 the couple had a son who also works as a doctor.

Honors

• Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class (2008)
• Honorary doctorate from the veterinary faculty of the LMU (2010)
• Honorary membership of the German Transplant Society (2012)
• Honorary Citizen of the State Capital Munich (2014)

Web links

Commons : Bruno Reichart  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Bruno Reichart , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 46/2007 from November 17, 2007, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
• ( Page no longer available , search in web archives: without page title )
• CV at Who is Who
• Interview in “Die Zeit” on June 7, 2007

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Dissertation: Core dry weight and participation of 3H-thymidine in DNA synthesis in single nuclei of the regenerating rat liver .
2. ↑ Transplant medicine: New Zealand pigs are supposed to compensate for the lack of donor organs , Transplantation.de of May 25, 2012 ( Memento of the original of April 19, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ New Collaborative Research Centers at LMU , LMU website from May 24, 2012, accessed on April 27, 2016
4. ↑ Veronika Hackenbroich: Stubbornness is part of it. Interview with Reichart, Der Spiegel No. 50, December 8, 2018
5. ↑ ^{a b} Entry on Reichart on med-log-inst.com ( Memento of the original from March 17, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
6. ↑ Heads in Bavaria. In: Bavarian television . January 2, 2005.
7. ↑ Press release from LHS Munich