Professor Peter Macdonald

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Professor Peter Macdonald is Conjoint Professor of Medicine in the University of New South Wales, senior staff Cardiologist in the Cardiopulmonary Transplant Unit at St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney and co-head of the Transplantation Research Laboratory at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute.

Major research interests over the last 20 years have been in the areas of heart failure, pulmonary hypertension, transplant allograft rejection, donor management and organ preservation injury. Professor Macdonald has established a basic research laboratory at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, which has developed a variety of in vitro and in vivo models in order to investigate these areas. He has been involved in multiple clinical studies with the major focus being the translation of laboratory findings into clinical practice.

Professor Macdonald is a senior member of the cardiothoracic transplant program at St Vincent’s Hospital, which is the largest cardiothoracic program in Australia and regarded as a leading transplant program internationally. His expertise in the management of critically ill patients undergoing cardiopulmonary transplantation has helped him to play a critical role in the development of a highly successful mechanical assistance program for patients with advanced heart failure.

In 2014, in a world-first breakthrough, Professor Macdonald and his team successfully transplanted a heart that had stopped beating for 20 minutes.

The heart was brought back to life, then placed on the Heart-in-a-Box machine, before it was injected with a unique preservation solution – developed by the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in the Cardiac Transplantation Laboratory.