Local doctors successfully transplanted seven organs to a 7-year-old girl last fall, Asan Medical Center said Thursday.

It is the first simultaneous transplant in Korea involving that many organs, and a sign of a new era of treatments for hard-to-cure disease, the medics said.

According to the hospital, Dr. Kim Do-yeon and his team in October transplanted liver, pancreas, small intestine, stomach, duodenum, large intestine and spleen to Cho Eun-seo, who had suffered from chronic intestinal pseudo-obstruction syndrome for six years.

The disease, according to the U.S. National Children’s Hospital’s definition, is rare disorder of gastrointestinal motility where coordinated contractions in the intestinal tract become altered and inefficient. When this happens, nutritional requirements cannot be adequately met, it said. Only about 10 people are registered as patients in Korea and their four-year survival rate is 70 percent. Organ transplant is the only known cure.

Born in 2005 as a premature baby, Cho was diagnosed with the disease at birth and had undergone a couple of major surgeries to reposition her stomach and colon. She had been living on the injection of rehydration solutions in place of foods.

The surgery was a success and Cho began eating solid food from November and is scheduled to be released from the hospital this week, the hospital said.

“Most of Cho’s organs have lost their function. The medics were preparing for the transplant for two years,” Kim said. “Organ transplant on children is much more difficult than that on adults because the size of organs is small and the chances of failure is high. But luckily, the donor, who was declared brain-dead, had physical characteristics similar to Cho, which made the whole process much easier,” he added.

Before Cho, most transplants here involved a maximum of three organs at the same time. Given the fact that the operation was for a child, the success rate would have been very low, observers said.

“The surgery ability of each medical staff member as well as the teamwork was very crucial. But it paid off. The success has paved a way for rare disease treatments through organ transplant,” Kim said.

Cho’s mother, Kim Young-ah, was ready to take her daughter home.

“She has been practicing eating food. She is smiling and healthy. It is like a dream,” she said via a hospital publicist.

By Bae Ji-sook (baejisook@heraldcorp.com)