Antonio Pinna, MD

Noted transplant surgeon Antonio Pinna, MD, serves as Director of the Abdominal Transplant Center and the Living Donor Liver Transplant Program at Cleveland Clinic Florida. His medical career spans four decades and includes personally performing nearly 3,000 liver, kidney and intestinal transplantation surgeries. Dr. Pinna specializes in living donor liver transplantation, split liver transplantation, liver transplant to treat hepatocellular cancer, liver transplantation in patients with familial amyloidosis, and domino liver transplant technique. He also has extensive experience in the surgical treatment of patients with pancreatic and biliary cancers and bowel lengthening surgery as an alternative to intestinal transplantation. 

Dr. Pinna was Director of the Liver Transplant Program and Hepatobiliary Surgery in the Digestive Disease Institute at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi before joining Cleveland Clinic Florida. He remains part of a leading team of organ transplantation experts who travel throughout Cleveland Clinic’s global enterprise performing transplant surgeries and ensuring patients receive world-class transplant care. 

Previously, Dr. Pinna served as Director of the General Surgery and Transplant Division at the University of Bologna where he established the first small bowel transplant program in Italy, expanded the division to include living related kidney transplants, and established the hepato-biliary cancer program. He also served as a professor of surgery at the University of Bologna for more than 15 years.

A prolific researcher, Dr. Pinna has numerous peer-reviewed publications covering a breadth of research pursuits, from liver-dual kidney transplantation and the treatment of hepatitis C recurrence after liver transplantation to treatments for pancreatic, bile duct and liver cancer. He has advanced new immunosuppression strategies to improve patient outcomes and pioneered techniques in small bowel transplantation. Today he serves on the editorial board for Annals of Surgery and is a reviewer of the leading industry journals Transplantation, American Journal Transplantation, Liver Transplantation, and Clinical Transplantation.

Fellowship trained in organ transplantation at University of Pittsburgh’s Thomas E. Starzl Transplant Institute, Dr. Pinna earned his medical degree from Sapienza University of Rome, where he also completed his general surgery residency. He is a member of several professional societies, including The Transplantation Society, the American Surgical Transplant Society, the European Society of Organ Transplantation, and the International Liver Transplant Society, among others.