The Vanderbilt Transplant Center (VTC) is expanding its footprint into Alabama with the opening of a satellite pre-transplant evaluation clinic for kidney patients.

For 17 years Sgt. Burrel “Chip” Davis has answered the call to help his community.

The National Institutes of Health has awarded a four-year, $6 million grant to investigators at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) and the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) to develop an implantable artificial kidney.

Misty Roberts routinely tunes into three Christian radio stations and has a habit of switching from one to another when the chatter begins. But one day last fall she didn’t touch the dial during a segment about the thousands of people waiting for life-saving kidney transplants.

Thanks to a series of altruistic donations that began in Colorado, three people who were waiting for a kidney received a life-saving transplant, including a patient at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Nephrologist William Fissell IV, M.D., associate professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering, is intent on creating and mass-producing an implantable bioartificial kidney that can transform quality of life and prospects for survival for people with chronic kidney disease who would otherwise be forced onto dialysis.