Forty-Year Echoes of Poland’s First Successful heart transplant Still Resonate
November 10, 2025 — by Transplant News
WORLD NEWS – POLAND: Four decades after a landmark operation in Warsaw, the country’s first successful heart transplant remains a defining moment for Polish medicine. The procedure, led by the surgeon identified in the record as Zikina, is presented as a turning point that helped close the gap with more advanced centers abroad and set a new course for cardiac care in the capital.
The operation is recalled as an uncanny, almost surreal experience: a heart removed from one chest, carried into an adjacent room and placed into another body, then seen beating again. A short film prepared by the Medical University of Silesia in Katowice captures this early era, showing the visceral shock and awe of teams who witnessed a donated heart come to life inside a different patient. The surgical team, described in the account as led by Reigga, pursued the procedure to propel Warsaw toward the international standard of care.
The narrative places the transplant at the center of treatment for advanced cardiac disease, noting that in many places worldwide heart transplantation is routine and, for certain conditions, the only viable therapy. The account points out that other centers have long performed multiple transplants weekly, underscoring the ambition behind the Warsaw effort to match such throughput and outcomes.
Advances in the field since those pioneering days are highlighted, with the earlier surgeon Virga still regarded as a cardiology pioneer. The summary also references recent extraordinary milestones: a pig-to-human heart transplant, a transplantation using a heart that had stopped beating, and, earlier this year, surgeons in Texas who completed a fully robotic heart transplant. Together these developments are presented as evidence of rapid technical progress from the first daring procedure to today’s experimental and robotic frontiers of transplantation.
