Affiliated with Wuhan University, Zhongnan Hospital has a capacity of 3,300 beds and has attracted many renowned doctors. It has more than 500 staff members with senior professional titles. Among them, 51 are doctoral advisors, 195 are master’s advisors, and 21 are eligible for discretionary government allowances from the State Council. The hospital has a key laboratory to serve transplant medical technology in Hubei Province.^{838 839}

In 2006, former French President Jacques Chirac laid the first stone of the Liver and Gallbladder Disease Research Institute, which was formally established at Zhongnan Hospital in 2007. The institute’s medical center specializes in liver, gallbladder, pancreas, spleen, portal hypertension, abdominal surgery and minimally invasive surgery. The hepatobiliary surgery department and transplant surgery department performs conventional liver, kidney, pancreas, small intestine, combined kidney and liver, allogeneic liver cell, spleen cell, and islet cell transplantation. It claims that its total transplant volume ranks sixth in the country. The clinical department (including liver gallbladder and transplant surgery), a subdivision, has a top-grade ward and laminar-flow operating rooms and an ICU. It has more than 150 specialist beds and 10 ICU beds. 3

The institute named former president of The Transplantation Society Jeremy R. Chapman, and former president of Transplantation Society of Australia and New Zealand Philip O’Connell, as honorary professors. The team has successfully launched 23 new technologies and new businesses. It has received more than 10 national and provincial science and technology awards and more than RMB 10 million in research funding. It has published more than 10 SCI papers and held numerous international and national conferences. ⁸⁴⁰

Vice President Ye Qifa is currently the director of the Ministry of Health’s Transplantation Medicine Engineering Research Center and the chairman of its technical committee. He was formerly the head of surgery in an important Ministry of Education organ transplantation laboratory and the first surgeon in China to implement a variety of new techniques in liver transplantation. Ye is an innovator in liver transplantation surgical method in China, and was known to have made many national “firsts.” He studied abdominal surgery and transplantation at Heidelberg University, University of Bonn and University of Rostock in Germany from 1989 to 1994. He has received more than 20 national funding projects and over 10 national and provincial science and technology awards. He has edited/co-edited more than 10 books, and published more than 300 papers. Ye has also now mentored more than 80 master’s and PhD students.⁸⁴¹

This hospital became the first unit approved by the Ministry of Health to perform transplants using donations after cardiac death (DCD). Ye Qifa was one of the most important proponents of the Chinese DCD operations, of which his team has performed the most. Huang Jiefu called this team the domestic icon of the DCD field.⁸⁴²

According to a report from www.cnhubei.com dated July 9, 2015, a 26-year-old man was diagnosed with a rare disease called “TTR amyloidosis” at Nanjing General Hospital in May 2015. The only treatment was liver transplant. The report stated Zhongnan Hospital found a matching donor ⁸⁴³ which enabled Ye Qifa to perform transplant surgery for this patient on June 15—less than a week later. ⁸⁴⁴ The report didn’t indicate how the hospital found a donor in such a short period of time, nor provide any information on the donor’s identity.