Lee Foster's friends and neighbors smiled, waved, honked and enjoyed cake pops

The Vanderbilt Transplant Center’s cardiac surgeons transplanted four hearts in one 48-hour stretch in August, thanks to VUMC’s perfusion and organ recovery teams traveling more than 4,000 miles across the country to obtain the donor organs.

For years, doctors told Piper Davis it was impossible to have a heart transplant. She was born with just one ventricle, or pumping chamber, instead of two. A generation ago, such patients didn’t survive into adulthood.

Vanderbilt researchers conducted the largest analysis to date of a heart complication in children following stem cell transplant. The findings may help guide screening practices to improve outcomes.

A multidisciplinary team from Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Columbia University has demonstrated that injured human donor lungs declined for transplant can be recovered by cross-circulation between the human lung and a xenogeneic host.

The Vanderbilt Transplant Center performed 73 transplants in May, setting a Medical Center record for the most transplants in a month. Sixteen of those were heart transplants — also a monthly record — cementing VUMC’s status as the busiest heart transplant center in the country.

Rachel Forbes, MD, MBA, associate professor of Surgery, has been appointed chief of the Division of Kidney and Pancreas Transplantation in the Department of Surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, effective June 1.