The News Minute | August 30, 2014 | 06:15 pm ISTThe Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, Kochi has conducted the first successfully combined pancreas-kidney transplant in Kerala. The transplantation was done on a thirty-five-year-old engineer S. Syed Yunus Shahir from Palakkad district of Kerala. The Firstpost reported that the he was suffering from Type I diabetes for the past 19 years and had later developed complications and was at an end stage of kidney failure. Dr. Ramachandran N. Menon, who conducted the surgery, said that the patient had come to them and completed all the required tests to be able to be cleared for conducting the transplant but had to wait for two months to get a donor. The Kerala Network for Organ Sharing (KNOS), the state’s nodal agency for organ retrieval and sharing had made the organs available. The doctor appreciated the role played by the agency in ‘facilitating the smooth transfer of pancreas and one kidney from a brain dead person.’ The first such transplant in the world was conducted in 1966 in the USA.