TEHRAN — In a first such effort in organ transplantation in Iran, an air ambulance was used to transport a heart harvested from a brain dead patient for a recipient hundreds of kilometers away.

Mohammad-Javad, 14, from the southwestern city of Bushehr, was announced brain dead after sustaining injuries to the head caused by an accident.

His heart was a perfect match for Adel, father of three, who was hospitalized some 750 kilometers away in Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Hospital, suffering from an advanced heart failure. He wouldn’t survive without a transplant, YJC reported on Monday.

A medical team comprising three doctors boarded on a private jet at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport at 4 a.m. and arrived at 5 a.m. in Bushehr.

The medical team in Tehran and Bushehr are contacting minute by minute to check up on the recipient status and make sure everything is going as planned as coordination is of an essence here.

After moving the organ from the donor’s body they only have four hours to take the heart to Tehran and transplant it into the recipient’s body.

They get on the private jet at 7 a.m. and land in Tehran at 8 a.m. and somehow manage to be at the hospital nine minutes later.

And finally in less than a three-hour procedures doctors manage to transplant the heart successfully and the heart starts to beat.

This was the first aerial transfer of an organ for a transplant in Iran 47 years after the first transplant surgery carried out in Shiraz Namazi Hospital, Fars province, in 1969.

MQ/MG