Professor Carlo Pulitano is a hepatobiliary and transplant surgeon and academic at the University of Sydney and Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPA). He graduated from medical school in Milan and completed six years of general surgical training across Milan, Paris, and Edinburgh. In 2011, he moved to Sydney to undertake a clinical fellowship at RPA, where he worked for nearly three years. He subsequently completed a PhD in Transplantation Surgery at the University of Sydney, strengthening his focus on translational research in organ preservation and transplantation.

Professor Pulitano then undertook an advanced fellowship in Hepatobiliary and Organ Transplantation Surgery at Toronto General Hospital, Canada, before returning to Australia and being appointed a Consultant Surgeon at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. He is Director of the Liver Transplant Oncology Program and Director of the Centre for Advanced Research in Liver, Pancreas and Biliary Surgery at RPA. In July 2019, he was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Sydney.

COARO – Organ assessment, repair and long-term preservation

Professor Pulitano is Director of COARO (the RPA Translational Centre for Organ Assessment, Repair and Optimisation), a translational laboratory and clinical implementation platform focused on overcoming time constraints in transplantation through advanced preservation, functional assessment, and organ optimisation technologies.

COARO’s work has demonstrated extended preservation of human organs for up to seven weeks, enabling sustained ex vivo support to facilitate organ repair, regeneration, and targeted modification prior to transplantation. Building on this translational pipeline, Professor Pulitano is leading the first clinical trial of long-term organ preservation in which organs are preserved for up to four days prior to transplantation, creating new opportunities for safer logistics, improved matching, enhanced viability assessment, and therapeutic intervention before implantation.

Collectively, this program aims to redefine preservation as an active treatment phase—transforming transplantation from a time-critical emergency procedure into a planned, data-driven intervention supported by organ repair and optimisation.

ProfessorCarlo Pulitano

LEARNING & TEACHING SUMMARy