Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Bruno Reichart

Senior Scientific Officer

Dr. Bruno Reichart studied medicine in Erlangen and Munich where he received his doctor-title in the field of experimental hematology. After his internship in various Munich hospitals, he started his surgical training in 1971 under the Profs. R. Zenker und W. Klinner – the latter was Chair of the Dept. for Cardiovascular Surgery at the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU). Soon Dr. Reichart decided to focus on cardiovascular surgery. One big first step was the residency at the Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis/Tennessee in 1973. Back in Munich, he finished his surgical exams and did his habilitation (German PhD) on mechanical assist devices for treatment of right-heart failure. From 1979 on, he became interested in thoracic transplantations. For that reason, he spent several weeks at Stanford University where he learned the techniques of heart and heart-lung transplantation under the Profs. Shumway and Jamieson.

Between 1981 to 1984, Dr. Reichart led the team of the first German heart transplantation series, he did the first German heart and lung transplantation in 1983. In the same year, he became Professor of Cardiovascular Surgery. From 1984 to 1990, he was Chairman of the Dept. of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the University of Cape Town, South Africa and therefore the first successor of Prof. Christiaan Barnard. One of his main scientific interests were concordant (green vervet monkey-to-baboon) heart transplantations.

Back in Munich, Dr. Reichart followed his teacher Prof. W. Klinner on the LMU-Chair of Cardiovascular Surgery. Together with Prof. E. Wolf, he started discordant preclinical cardiac pig-to-baboon xenotransplantation in 1998, first supported by the Bavarian, then by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The now Transregio 127 is a collaboration with MH Hanover, TU Dresden, German Primate Center, and the Friedrich Löffler/Paul Ehrlich/Robert Koch Institutes. The DFG-grant was recently extended until 2024.