Innovations in transplantology: heart transplantation program development in Russian Federation

2017 commemorates two significant milestones in the history of the world’s and Russian transplantology: 50th anniversary of the world’s first heart transplantation and 30th anniversary of Russia’s first heart transplantation. The combination of these remarkable events is an additional stimulus to evaluate and reflect on the state of domestic transplantology and its place in the world. There is a latent but wide-spread notion that heart transplantation is a certain indicator of the state of medicine and biomedical science level in the country. Our paper looks at the data on the state and recent progress in clinical heart transplantation in Russia, as well as on the innovations that made it possible to further develop this very important avenue of surgical support.