Surgeons Spotlight Partial Heart Transplants as Scalable Source of Growing Valves for Children

Overview

• Partial heart transplantation, presented at ISHLT’s Toronto meeting this week, was described by Duke surgeon Joseph Turek as ready and reproducible for wider pediatric use.
• The operation replaces only faulty valves with living donor valves that can grow with a child, which could spare repeated high‑risk surgeries caused by fixed‑size prosthetic valves.
• Using valves from roughly 5,000 U.S. heart transplants each year could yield thousands of additional pediatric valve grafts after screening out unusable tissue, according to surgeons.
• Some centers now perform pediatric donation‑after‑circulatory‑death heart retrieval with brief back‑table reanimation to check function, a practice aimed at expanding viable donations.
• Experts warned of a severe pediatric donor shortfall and urged faster U.S. allocation updates and more flexible donor selection, while teams also test heart–thymus co‑transplantation and early xenotransplantation to reduce rejection and boost supply.