Heart Transplantation

Administrative Office 770 Welch Road Suite 100 Palo Alto, CA 94034

Phone: (650) 721-2598

 

Learn more about our exciting hospital expansion by visiting growing.lpch.org Note that during this expansion, routes to 770 Welch have changed.

 
The Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Pediatric Heart Transplant program is one of the oldest and most successful programs of its kind in the United States.
 

Serafina Akard received a successful heart transplant after surviving nearly eight weeks on the Berlin Heart device

A National Leader in Pediatric Heart Transplantation Volume and Success Rates

Our program has transplanted over 250 children to date. We perform an average of 15 transplants each year, making us one of the busiest pediatric heart transplant programs in the nation. Despite the high volume and complexity of our patients' conditions, our one- and five-year survival outcomes lead the nation.
 

Pioneering Pediatric Heart Transplantation

Our program was founded at Stanford Hospital & Clinics by a team led by heart transplant pioneer Dr. Norman Shumway. Together, Stanford and Packard Children’s Hospital have the largest group of long-term pediatric survivors of cardiac transplantation in the nation. This includes one of the largest groups of children who have lived for more than 25 years post-transplant.
 
Our team today continues to advance pediatric heart transplantation. Some of our work includes:

• Developing some of the immunosuppression protocols that are now standard practice nationwide
• Documenting that the transplanted heart grows in young infants
• Describing the first treatment to substantially reduce the risk of chronic rejection in children
• Investigating a new blood test to evaluate cardiac rejection. This could eventually eliminate the need for routine surveillance biopsies. This is a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-sponsored project.

Our Transplant Patients

We transplant children with a variety of complex and high-risk conditions. Our patients’ diagnoses range from complex cardiac conditions that are present at birth (congenital) to various forms of cardiomyopathy.
 
We also specialize in transplanting high-risk patients who have developed antibodies against potential donor organs. To combat this problem, our team has developed treatment protocols that are supported by a unique antibody detection technique that currently exists only at Stanford University. Antibody detection is done before and after transplantation. The results help determine whether treatment is necessary to eliminate the antibody and prevent rejection.
 
 

Children’s Heart Center

The Packard Children's Hospital Children’s Heart Center provides your child with a full range of services. Our Center's heart transplantation-related services include:
 
Alternatives or bridges to transplant. Our Pediatric Heart Transplant program is complemented by the Pediatric Advanced Cardiac Therapies (PACT) program. PACT provides artificial circulatory assist devices as alternatives to or bridges to transplant. These include ECMO, the Berlin Heart, the Thoratec PVAD, and the HeartMate II. PACT implants between five and 10 ventricular assist devices per year. They are one of the most experienced teams nationally with the use of the Berlin Heart in children as a bridge to transplant.
 
Intensive care. Our Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit (CVICU) provides advanced critical care to children with heart disease, including children with heart failure or who are post-transplant.
 
 

Team

	Daniel Bernstein, MD
	Katsuhide Maeda, MD
	Olaf Reinhartz, MD – Surgical Director
	David Rosenthal, MD - Medical Director
	Justin Yeh, MD