Pediatric Transplant Center

The Pediatric Transplant Center at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford is a national transplant volume leader with more than 25 years of experience performing pediatric organ transplants.

We excel at handling the toughest challenges. We provide high-touch care to high acuity cases for children needing all kinds of transplants, including heart, lung, liver, kidney, intestine and combined transplants.

• No. 1 in the Western United States in organ transplant volume in patients 18 years and younger, and No. 3 nationwide.
• Stanford Medicine Children’s Health cares for some of the youngest, smallest, and most acute patients in the country. In 2020, four patients younger than 1 year were transplanted, with the youngest being just 5 months old.
• Heart: No. 1 in the Western United States in pediatric heart transplant volume.
  • The world’s first pediatric heart transplant was performed at Stanford more than 35 years ago. Since that time, the organization has performed more than 500 pediatric heart transplants.
  • Stanford Medicine Children’s Health has performed the highest volume of pediatric heart transplants in California for nine straight years.
  • In addition to performing 24 heart transplants in 2020, the team implanted 18 ventricular assist devices (VAD), which help extend patients’ lives until they receive a donor heart. Stanford Medicine Children’s Health is one of the highest-volume pediatric VAD programs in the United States.
• Lung and Heart-Lung: The first pediatric heart-lung transplant was performed at Stanford in 1988, and since then, the organization has performed more than 85 pediatric lung and heart-lung transplants.
• Liver and Intestine: No. 1 in pediatric liver transplant volume in the Western United States.
  • Stanford Medicine Children’s Health has performed more than 800 pediatric liver and intestinal transplants since the inception of the program in 1995.
  • The median liver transplant waiting time for Stanford Medicine Children’s Health patients is 2.7 months, compared with the national median of 10.1 months.
• Kidney: No. 1 in kidney transplant volume and survival outcomes in the United States.
  • Doctors at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health were the first in the world to perform an innovative approach to kidney transplantation that prevents the need to take immune-suppressing drugs over the long term.
  • Over the past five years, Stanford Medicine Children’s Health has performed more pediatric kidney transplants than any other U.S. program.
  • One-year and three-year survival rates for Stanford Medicine Children’s Health kidney transplant patients are 100 percent.

Transplant Outcomes Report

As this report demonstrates, our approach has achieved some of the best outcomes in the country for the more than 2,000 transplants we have conducted since our founding. Many of these transplants were for the youngest, smallest, and most acutely ill organ-failure patients. Download our Transplant Outcomes Report >