Cancer and hepatitis had destroyed Mitsuka Brown’s liver. Doctors predicted she had only months to live if she didn’t get a transplant. But donor livers are in short supply and in great demand.

So, for the first time in North Carolina, surgeons at UNC Hospitals performed a living-related, adult-to-adult liver transplant: Brown’s 44-year-old daughter, Barbra Howard, gave a piece of her liver to her ailing mother.

In a seven-hour operation, Mark Johnson and David Gerber, both assistant professors of surgery, removed half of Howard’s liver. It took six more hours for Jeffrey H. Fair, assistant professor of surgery, to graft the section of Howard’s healthy liver onto her 67-year-old mother’s failing one.

Within days, Brown was showing signs of improvement. “I feel good now for the first time in a long time,” she says.

Howard, a certified public accountant, was back at work two months after the operation. “The doctors saw me the week after I was discharged, and they haven’t needed to see me since,” she says.

Usually, a patient needing a liver transplant has to wait for an organ to become available from a cadaver. Fifteen percent of patients on the waiting list for donor livers die before one becomes available, Fair says. And the list grows longer every year.

But now a patient in desperate need of a liver may not have to wait for an organ that never comes. Fair estimates that living adult-to-adult liver transplants will supply up to a third of the needs in the United States.

Using an organ from a living donor allows doctors to operate while the patient is relatively healthy. And a living organ will work better sooner.

Transplanting from living donors is possible because of the liver’s remarkable ability to regenerate. No other organ in the human body can do that. In about six weeks, both the donor and recipient livers grow to accommodate their bodies’ needs. The liver serves as the body’s pantry and washing machine, storing surplus sugars and removing toxins from the blood.

Adult-to-child transplants have been performed for several years. The adult-to-adult operation “is essentially the same procedure as the adult-to-child, but it’s much harder because of the magnitude involved,” Fair says. A larger section of liver is needed, requiring many more delicate surgical connections.

Since the first surgery, Fair and his team have performed two more living-related adult-to-adult liver transplants. All four patients are doing well.