Dr Hynek Mergental, MD, PhD is a Consultant Surgeon at the Liver Unit at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Birmingham. He obtained PhD in experimental surgery at the Charles University in Prague and completed fellowships at transplant and HPB centres in Groningen, Kyoto, Oxford and London. Hynek led the introduction of the machine perfusion programme at the Liver Unit in Birmingham in 2013.
Dr Mergental is passionate about research to improve patients’ access to liver transplantation by efficient use of livers procured after circulatory death and marginal donors rescued by novel organ preservation technologies. His team pioneered viability testing and performed the world-first transplant series with discarded livers using normothermic assessment and has adopted the normothermic regional perfusion for DCD donors.
His research group portfolio includes mechanistic studies, therapeutic approaches to resuscitate fatty livers, and embraces week-long perfusions. Hynek was Principal Investigator in several clinical trials with liver perfusion devices. He published in journals including Nature, Journal of Hepatology or American Journal of Transplantation, reporting different liver perfusion strategies and the use of machine perfusion to increase utilisation of marginal organs.
