Dr. Krzysztof Siedlecki: Trying to Change a Culture

“Please leave your organs on earth. God does not need them in heaven.”– Pope John Paul

For lack of an organ donor or access to qualified medical facilities and equipment, only 30 per cent of the 6,500 people currently who could be helped by a kidney, heart, or liver transplant in Ukraine will survive.

In Western countries, the mortality rate is less than 10 per cent. This is disturbing to Dr. Krzysztof Siedlecki, the medical doctor in charge of Astellas Pharma in Ukraine. He is trying to so something about it.

Ukraine has no more than 140 organ transplants of all kinds each year. Neighboring Poland, where Dr. Siedlecki was born, raised and educated, has 10 times that many. The sizes of the two populations are similar.

What’s more, when it comes to renal deficiencies, there are not sufficient artificial kidney machines (dialysis) in Ukraine to serve the number of patients in need. Without treatment or transplant, the patient dies.

“I am not discouraged but cooled down a little bit,” Dr. Siedlecki said. “Ukraine simply does not have a healthy population.” He mentioned the high incidence of AIDS, tuberculosis and renal deficiency.

Every year in Ukraine, 2,000 people with kidney disease, 1,500 with liver ailments, 1,000 with heart problems and another 2,000 patients with acute diabetes could live if there were sufficient organs for transplant.

In Western Europe, the patient is put on a dialysis several times a week until a donor kidney is available. This can work in nearly 100 per cent of the cases. In Ukraine, some never even get to dialysis. “People die because they simply are not getting support,” he said.

“How can Ukraine solve the problem? Buy and build more artificial kidneys and make treatment available for those who are suffering, or increase the number of transplants,” said Dr. Siedlecki. 

Interviewed recently in his downtown office, the former surgeon, whose company Astellas manufacturers an organ anti-rejection drug called Prograf, clearly prefers transplants over extended dialysis.

“It’s much better when you think of dialysis as two or three times a week having to go to a special center and be attached to a machine for a number of hours,” he said. “It is like being on a leash. You have very little chance to travel outside the city due to the regularity of the treatments.

“People with transplants can come back to a normal life. Women can have babies, men and women can come back to work and have normal lives,” Dr. Siedlecki said. “There is care after the operation, but in the long run a transplant is cheaper than continued dialysis.”

Does Astellas have a commercial interest in more transplants taking place in Ukraine? Of course, he readily says, but anti-rejection medicine represents a very small part of Astellas’ portfolio in Ukraine.

“I started out in transplantology,” he said. “It is my job and was my job. It is a branch of medicine that is very interesting and still under-developed. When I came to Ukraine I found it more under-developed than in other parts of the world. When I find I can combine my professional interests with my personal interest, it’s important and makes me happy.”

However, in Ukraine, there is no culture of organ donations and transplants. Dr. Siedlecki would like to change this. He has begun a web site and held several roundtables with experts in an effort to popularize organ donation.

Currently, when there are transplants in Ukraine, it is generally a relative who is the donor. In a society that readily accepts the idea of organ transplants, individuals carry cards that specify they are organ donors.

“The biggest problem, constraint, is society’s approach to and the understanding of transplants. And Society’s understanding is in direct proportion to the journalistic approach. Journalist help form the opinion of society. They have influence,” said Dr. Siedlecki.

The doctor notes that he signed up to donate his organs for transplant 30 years ago. “Now I can potentially save 7 people donating heart, two kidneys, liver, pancreas and pair of lungs, not mentioning corneas, bones, tendons and other body parts,”

When the word goes out about organ transplants, the doctor wants it to be a positive message and not “sensationalism and transforming reality” because “society will have the vision presented to them.

“If presented as a something semi-legal which can be done in mysterious places, stories of children kidnapped for their organs, people will be afraid to donate. And this is far from the truth,” said Dr. Siedlecki.

This is why the pharmaceutical executive has launched a public relations effort aimed at dispelling negative attitudes about organ donation. He cites the late religious leader Pope John Paul II in suggesting people leave their organs on earth. He says the statement was very effective in Poland.

Thus far, other than the Ukraine transplantology web site which is updated daily, Dr. Siedlecki has held educational roundtables with the media in Kyiv and L’viv and has others scheduled around the country.

Dr. Siedlecki, 52, has lived in Ukraine for over three years, but travels back and forth to Warsaw every other week where his wife, Magdalena, is also a doctor. He has one son who currently lives in UK.

A member of the Board of Directors of the European Business Association, Dr. Siedlecki is an avid traveler, having visited some of the world’s most exotic places, including most countries in Africa.

His longest trip was coming back from Bora Bora to Poland which took 44 hours. “My main hobby is travel, maybe not extreme but semi-extreme,” he said. He likes to travel by car throughout Ukraine and Russia.

“Every culture is different, and that’s what I like,” he concluded.

But one culture he would like to change is in Ukraine. He would like to see a more open attitude toward transplants and, in fact, more transplants that will save lives.