Daily Archives: May 30, 2010

Talk about a bum deal. A man has diabetes and finally gets a kidney transplant, but the kidney is cancerous? Talk about being cheated in life. After a five-year wait, Vincent Liew was ecstatic when he got the call in 2002 that a new kidney was available for him. The 37-year-old diabetic was in complete kidney failure and receiving dialysis three times every week. Liew and his wife Kimberly believed the transplanted kidney would save his life. Instead, the kidney was a ticking time bomb that killed him just seven months later.

Experts say that apparently Liew is the first man ever to die of uterine cancer. There are no medical records of another transplant patient succumbing to the deadly disease, and men, of course, have no uterus to develop the cancer in the absence of a transplant.

Originally from Singapore, Liew lived in New York and worked at the Hong Kong Economic Office. Dr. Thomas Diflo at NYU Langone Hospital performed the transplant. The kidney was from an apparently healthy 50-year-old woman, Sandy Cabrera, who had died from a stroke the day before. Unbeknownst to Liew and his doctor, the woman had an undiagnosed uterine cancer. She appeared healthy and no one at St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital, where she died, suspected that she carried the deadly disease. Relatives, friends and even the patient herself believed she was perfectly healthy until the stroke.

Just days after the transplant, an autopsy revealed that the donor had uterine cancer. No one knows why Dr. Diflo, who performed the transplant, was not informed of the cancer for almost two months. Liew’s widow, Kimberly Liew, has sued Dr. Diflo and the hospital where the transplant took place. Testifying in the malpractice case, Dr. Diflo says that he told Liew it would be safest to remove the transplanted kidney, but assured him that there was a very low chance that he would develop a type of cancer based in the female organs.

Liew opted to keep the kidney. Four months later, in extreme pain, Diflo removed the kidney. The organ was obviously cancerous at that point. A month later, just seven months after the transplant, Liew died. An autopsy found that Liew died from cancer, and that the cancer cells in his body were genetically female, meaning they originated in Cabrera’s body and were transplanted with the organ.

Despite safeguards, about 1 percent of transplants in the U.S. are believed to spread a disease including HIV, cancer, tuberculosis and others. Potential donors are screened for HIV and syphilis, and medical histories are taken, but a risk remains. For many donors, the probability of living years longer with the organ outweighs the small risk of infection with a deadly disease.