The Alpha-1 Channel

University of Florida News Service
Eight years ago, he sat in his living room, tethered to oxygen, his lungs rapidly deteriorating from pulmonary fibrosis. If Tom Telford had not become Patient No. 199, he probably would have gone on this way, unable to breathe, until he died.

That year, 2002, Telford became the 199th patient to receive a lung transplant at Shands at the University of Florida. He can’t run a marathon and struggles walking up a flight of stairs, but Patient No. 199 is alive. But for many lung transplant recipients, a successful transplant does not always ensure years of survival.

“At five years post-transplant, only 50 percent of recipients survive,” said Telford, a semi-retired nuclear engineer who lives in Gainesville. “I was No. 199. I knew 195 to 205. I exercised with these people and got to know them. Now, many of those people are not alive. It is pretty depressing.”

To help change these statistics, the state of Florida has awarded a $1 million grant to UF to establish a lung transplant center and fund research projects focused on problems such as chronic rejection, the most common reason why patients die after a lung transplant. The center emerged in 2010 from the flagship lung transplant program.

“Of the solid organ transplants, the survival rate of lung transplants is unfortunately the lowest,” said Mark Brantly, M.D., division chief of pulmonary medicine in the UF College of Medicine and a director of research efforts for the new lung transplant center. “There are many challenges in transplanting lungs not the least of which is chronic rejection. We are looking to develop a multicollege research group that will help advance our knowledge about rejection and will develop new therapeutics to improve our patients’ lives.”

Brantly also directs the Alpha-1 Research Program at the University of Florida.