The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has announced an interim agreement with The Asian Centre for Liver Diseases & Transplantation (ACLDT) in Singapore. This is the first step in what's expected to be a broader collaboration in the future. Under the agreement, UPMC will help ACLDT with its business and technology planning and with clinical consultations.
"In the way of telepathology, providing them with consult services for clinical transplants, some I.T. consultation, and helping them write the business plan that will ultimately help them get the financing to expand," said Charles Bogosta, president of UPMC's International and Commercial Services Division.
UPMC will not invest any financial capital in the agreement, but Bogosta said that if the agreement is expanded on a more permanent basis, they'll be responsible for managing the network for liver transplants, bone marrow transplants, and kidney transplants.
ACLDT is one of Asia's foremost liver centers, with outpatient facilities and a dedicated in-patient liver ward and intensive care unit to work alongside its living donor liver transplantation program. Based in Gleneagles Hospital in Singapore, ACLDT is the first private medical center in Southeast Asia to perform nearly 190 living-donor liver transplants. This agreement is expected to help ACLDT provide services to more patients and widen its scope of transplant offerings.
"They currently do approximately 100 to 150 transplants a year. We're going to be expanding to bone marrow and kidney. We don't yet have projections for how many we're going to serve, but if you think about Southeast Asia and the population in that area, the numbers are endless," said Bogosta.
Bogosta said that the hope is that UPMC will have the opportunity to move into a broader agreement with ACLDT by the middle of 2012. He likened it to ISMETT, a UPMC-operated organ transplant center in Italy. "The way it works today in Italy, all of the profits we make on the hospital in Italy are sent back to Pittsburgh and reinvested here," Bogosta said.
