Six 1st-Of-Its-Kind Procedures Performed In 2025, Including One at Duke

(Becker’s Hospital Review, Mariah Taylor) — In the first half of 2025, eight systems have performed first-of-their-kind procedures and clinical treatments.

1. Morgantown, WV-based WVU Heart and Vascular Institute physicians completed the world’s first robotic transcatheter aortic valve replacement explant and aortic valve replacement. The patient was discharged from the WVU Medicine’s cardiovascular ICU less than a week after undergoing the procedure.

2. A team of surgeons at Keck Medicine of Los Angeles-based University of Southern California and UCLA Health completed the world’s first human bladder transplant May 4. Over the eight-hour procedure, surgeons first transplanted the kidney, followed by the bladder. After the surgery, the kidney began functioning immediately, producing urine that drained properly into the new bladder. The patient has not required dialysis since the procedure.

3. A team from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine successfully treated a patient with a customized CRISPR gene-editing therapy in a world first. The patient was born with severe carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency. Standard treatment for the rare metabolic disease is a liver transplant, but the patient was not eligible for these transplants. The team designed a unique therapy for the patient’s specific variant of CPS1 and delivered it via lipid nanoparticles. The patient received the first dose in February at 6 months old, and received a follow-up dose in March and April. He was discharged on June 2 at 10 months old.

4. The cardiac surgery team at Washington, D.C.-based Children’s National Hospital is the first in the world to replace an artificial heart valve with a live tissue valve through a partial heart transplant. In this procedure, the Children’s National team replaced an 11-year-old male patient’s artificial mitral valve with a live working valve from a donor heart.

5. Clinicians at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore removed a rare spinal tumor through a patient’s eye socket. The patient had two rare slow-growing developmental bone tumors called chordomas in her spine that wrapped around her brain stem. In two procedures, surgeons removed the tumor around the brain stem through the skull and with an endoscope through her nose.

6. A team from Durham, NC-based Duke Health performed the world’s first living mitral valve replacement after a heart transplant patient donated healthy valves from their original heart to two other patients. Following a full heart transplant on an 11-year-old patient, valves were donated to a 14-year old patient and a 9-year-old patient.