First liver transplant with a living donor and surgical robot at LUMC

Leiden, 26 September 2025. For the first time, LUMC has used a surgical robot to remove a piece of liver from a living donor and successfully transplant it into a patient. A woman received part of her cousin’s healthy liver. Both the donor and the recipient are doing well. With this type of transplantation, in which a healthy person donates part of their liver, LUMC hopes to offer more people with severe liver diseases a future.

The new LUMC transplantation program Living Donor Liver Transplants (LDLT), of which this transplant on September 19 was part, aims to treat more people with severe liver diseases in a timely manner.

The demand for donor livers is greater than the supply. Every year, patients on the waiting list die due to a shortage of donors. LUMC is one of three centers in the Netherlands that perform liver transplants. These are complex and life-saving operations for patients with, among others, liver failure, liver cancer, or cirrhosis. In the Netherlands, this involves about 200 to 250 liver transplants per year