Yuri S. Genyk
MD
Surgical Director of Liver and Intestinal Transplant, Children's Hospital Los Angeles,
Chief of Hepatobiliary Surgery and Abdominal Organ Transplantation Surgery Keck/USC,
Professor of Clinical Surgery at the USC School of Medicine.
A native of Ukraine, Dr. Genyk earned his medical degree from the Ivano-Frankivsk Medical Institute in Ukraine where he also completed his initial residency in 1986. He then completed a fellowship in renal transplantation at the Republican Transplant Center in Kiev, Ukraine. Before long, Dr. Genyk came to the United States as a researcher in transplant surgery at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, after which he commenced a second residency at University of Alabama’s Birmingham Medical Center in 1992. Additional years of fellowships in ASTS-approved Multi-Organ Transplantation programs at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Pennsylvania followed before Dr. Genyk joined the USC Liver Transplant program in September 1998.
Upon his arrival at USC, Dr. Genyk pioneered a living donor liver transplant, first at CHLA, and in May 1999 at USC University Hospital. In doing so, USC became the third transplant program in the nation and the first in the Western U.S. to start an adult-to-adult living donor liver transplantation program. Dr. Genyk and colleagues then performed the world’s first adult-to-adult transfusion-free living donor liver transplantation. Since then, Dr. Genyk’s pioneering expertise has made it possible to increase organ availability for patients on the waitlist, resulting in hundreds of living donor liver transplants performed at USC and CHLA and establishing both programs as nationally renowned centers for liver transplantation.
In 2009 Dr. Genyk became the Surgical Director of the Liver Transplant Program at Keck Medical Center of USC. Under his leadership the program grew into a nationally recognized and internationally renowned program with the number of liver transplants performed more than doubling over the last decade, from less than 40 in 2008 to over 100 by 2018.
Dr. Genyk has singly and collaboratively organized several national and international consensus conferences that led to the development of new definitions and new practice guidelines for patients with liver cirrhosis and renal dysfunction, new criteria for combined liver-kidney transplantation and management strategies for high acuity patients awaiting liver transplantation. In November 1998, Dr. Genyk initiated a split-liver transplant program in which the cadaveric liver was divided for two patients. Presently, the program at CHLA is among the best in the nation in terms of patient and graft survival.
Solidifying his trailblazing efforts, Dr. Genyk has also served as a tireless trainer & mentor to fellows, residents, and medical students, many of whom have gone on to bright academic medical careers. Alongside his mentees and surgical colleagues, Dr. Genyk continues to advance various surgical techniques and approaches, including robotic surgery, hemostatic agents, hepatorenal syndrome, vascular reconstruction in advanced pancreatic cancer, and immunosuppression, providing visionary inspiration and guidance along the way.
