Since our transplant program first began in 1967, the Comprehensive Transplant Center at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center has become a world leader in lifesaving care and transplant research, providing heart, lung, kidney, liver, pancreas and kidney-pancreas transplants.

Our established team of specialty trained transplant experts includes: 

• Disease specialists
• Transplant surgeons
• Infectious disease physicians
• Transplant coordinators
• Advanced practice providers
• Social workers
• Psychiatrists
• Transplant pharmacists

Being an academic medical center allows us access to the latest treatments and clinical trials of new immunosuppressive drugs and anti-rejection therapies. Our current standard of care is using prednisone-free immunosuppressive medications, a regimen available to about one quarter of all patients in the United States.

• Top 15 transplant program, by volume, in the United States
• 9,700 solid organ transplants since 1967
• More than 450 organ transplants performed each year
• Recognized by U.S. News & World Report among the top one percent of all hospitals in the nation caring for patients with kidney, pancreas, heart, lung and liver disease
• Multidisciplinary research collaboration with Nationwide Children’s Hospital at the Center for the Epidemiological Study of Organ Failure and Transplantation (CESOT) to improve outcomes in transplantation worldwide
• Members of the Acute Liver Failure Study Group, a collaborative network of 28 hospitals that have studied more than 3,000 cases of acute liver failure
• One of the largest and most experienced kidney-pancreas centers in the world
• Ability to perform living donor transplants of both the kidney and liver
• Only experts in central Ohio to perform Auto Islet cell transplantation to cure end state pancreatitis, which left untreated leads to diabetes

1967 — Living donor kidney transplant (Ohio State’s first organ transplant)

1983 — One of the first centers in the U.S. to study cyclosporine, an immunosuppressant that revolutionized transplantation

1984 — Liver transplant (first in Ohio)

1985 — Pancreas transplant

1988 — Combined kidney-pancreas transplant

1986 — Heart transplant

1998 — Lung transplant

1999 — Double lung transplant

1999 — Laparoscopic kidney donor surgery

2005 — Combined heart-double lung transplant kidney paired donation

2006 — One of very few sites in North America approved to process pancreatic islet cells for transplantation that may cure type 1 diabetes

2006 — Fourth institution in the country certified to implant the temporary CardioWest™ Total Artificial Heart, which serves as a bridge to transplant

2011 — Islet cell transplant

2011 — Six-way kidney transplant – largest living donor kidney transplant chain performed in Ohio to date

2016 — Lung-kidney transplant (only 37 performed is U.S. since 1995)

2016 — One of only 20 centers nationwide chosen to participate in the NOVEL clinical trial with XVIVO Perfusion, potentially doubling the donor pool of lungs for transplantation

2017 — Split liver transplant

2018 — Living donor liver transplant (one of two locations able to perform in Ohio)

2018 — One of a select few transplant centers currently involved in the normo thermic ex-vivo liver perfusion clinical phase study