A male patient successfully underwent a heart transplant at Tokyo Women's Medical University hospital, hospital officials said Tuesday.
The donor was a man in his 30s seriously injured in a car accident and pronounced brain dead Monday at Gifu Municipal Hospital, they said.
The university hospital had refrained from conducting such surgery after two doctors at the facility were indicted in June over alleged malpractice involving heart surgery on a 12-year-old girl.
The heart recipient, who suffers from drug-induced cardiomyopathy, had registered for the transplant before the malpractice case, the officials said. The hospital conducted the operation with the participation of a professor from the University of Tokyo and one from Saitama Medical College.
The two universities were designated as substitute sites for transplant surgery from brain-dead donors after the alleged malpractice incident.
The Organ Transplant Network, which is responsible for coordinating transplants of organs from brain-dead donors, earlier said the man's pancreas and kidneys would be transplanted to two other patients, in Kyushu and Hokkaido, but these operations were abandoned due to medical reasons.
Instead, the donor's kidneys were shared by two patients at Gifu University Hospital.