Vanderbilt Transplant Center

The charter that was written in 1989 upon the creation of the Vanderbilt Transplant Center (VTC) continues to hold true to its mission — to propel and direct organ transplantation, research, medicine, technology, education and the public education of transplantation into the future as the recognized leader and national authority of multi-organ transplantation.

Douglas Hanto, M.D., Ph.D., has his sights on Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. No stranger to building nationally recognized liver transplant programs — he has three under his belt — the new associate director of the Vanderbilt Transplant Center aims to work with the departments of Pediatrics and Surgery to develop a comprehensive pediatric liver center at Children’s Hospital.

More than three decades ago, J. Harold Helderman, M.D., medical director of the Vanderbilt Transplant Center, joined a handful of colleagues from across the country to create a society for transplant physicians.

A Vanderbilt University Medical Center postdoctoral research fellow in the area of transplant outcomes research has added health literacy as a metric to an existing battery of surveys that assess patient-reported outcomes in Vanderbilt transplant patients.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center will hold its fifth annual Donate Life Flag-Raising Ceremony as part of national Donate Life month. The event celebrates organ donor families, living donors and hospital staff who care for donors and transplant recipients.

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.

The Vanderbilt Transplant Center, one of the largest organ transplant programs in the Southeast, is on pace to surpass last year’s transplant totals with 254 solid organ transplantations to date.