Cuttack, April 27: The kidney transplant wing at SCB Medical College and Hospital achieved a milestone today as it conducted its 100th successful kidney transplant surgery.

A team of doctors led by the head of the renal transplant unit, Datteswar Hota, conducted the 100th transplant on Tarun Swain, a patient from Jagatsinghpur after a three-hour-long surgery today.

The mortality rate among transplant patients stood at 14 per cent as 14 kidney recipients have died. However, not a single donor death has been reported so far.

An official source said that the survival rate of kidney transplant patients after one year of surgery at SCB was more than 80 per cent, which was much higher than the international survival rate of 60 per cent to 65 per cent.

The first kidney transplant was conducted at SCB on March 19, 2012.

"We are going to start robot-assisted kidney transplant surgery by the end of this year to improve the success rate of surgeries even further. We have set a target to conduct another 100 transplant in the next two years," said Hota.

At present, four to five kidney transplants are conducted at SCB every month. It is expected that after the robotic surgery is introduced, the department will be able to do 10 to 12 more transplants every month.

Hota informed The Telegraph that state government had already sanctioned Rs 12 crore to start the robot-assisted kidney surgery programme at SCB. The new technology will be helpful in conducting the transplant with minimum invasion and the risk to the patient's life will also be minimised to a great extent.

The SCB also plans to start conducting cadaveric organ transplant by next year.

"We have already initiated the process of starting cadaveric organ transplant here. A preliminary discussion with the chief co-ordinator of the programme in the country, J. Amalorpavanathan, has also been done," Hota added.

The state government is expected to come up with notifications regarding the formation of committee to declare a person brain dead and other necessary technical guidelines shortly, official sources said.

SCB officials said that eight to nine out of 1,000 people in the state were suffering from kidney diseases and the prevalence rate of end stage renal disease was 1,800 per year. The kidney ailments are on the rise by 10 per cent every quarterly in the state.

The kidney transplant wing at SCB has come as a boon for patients from the economically weaker section who cannot afford a transplant that costs nearly Rs 8 lakh to Rs 10 lakh in any private hospital in the country.

But at SCB, a patient has to spend only Rs 2 lakh for undergoing the transplant. Besides, the patients undergoing the transplant are also provided immuno-suppression drugs worth Rs 90,000 free of cost after the surgery for one year.

The officials at the kidney transplant department have submitted a proposal of providing the drugs for at least two years to the patients belonging to below-poverty-line category.