Sidharth Sharma, MD, is a multi-organ transplant surgeon who specializes in liver and kidney transplants, and has a special interest in living donor transplants for which he utilizes his advanced training in microvascular surgery. In addition, he performs hepatobiliary procedures, managing and providing surgical expertise to patients with cancer. He does minimally invasive procedures such as laparoscopic donor nephrectomies for kidney transplant recipients and laparoscopic liver resections for liver cancers.
Dr. Sharma grew up in a family of physicians. “My dad is a surgeon, and my earliest memory is of looking at the pictorials of surgery steps in his textbooks,” he says. As a teenager, he helped his father care for patients a few days each month in an underserved clinic. “Years later, while doing a residency at a big cancer center in New York, I was drawn to transplant surgery, realizing that it is one of the most demanding and challenging specialties that exist in the field of surgery,” he says.
After a decade of training to become a transplant surgeon, Dr. Sharma feels fortunate to have surgical skills he can use to save the lives of people whose organs are failing. “My practice deals with patients who have end-stage organ failure and a very difficult clinical course, because they suffer so much from the side effects of organ failure, which can be anything from bleeding to falling into a comatose state,” he says. “One can only imagine how they spring back to life once they are treated and functional again, when they are able to work, and spend time with their families and kids again.”
An assistant professor of surgery (transplant) for Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Sharma is also a researcher with a special interest in liver perfusion pumps, which are machines that circulate enriched solutions around a donor liver to preserve it during transport to a recipient. “The goal of these artificial pumps is to allow us to accept more organs for our patients that might otherwise be rejected as unsuitable,” he says. “Our goal is to increase the usage of donor organs and decrease the discard rates.”
