NYU Langone Transplant Institute Celebrates 10 Years of Saving Lives

NEW YORK, March 31, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The NYU Langone Transplant Institute, which launched in March 2016, celebrates a decade of saving lives and transplanting over 4,270 organs while maintaining the highest quality standards in the nation.

"What we have accomplished in 10 years not only speaks to the dedicated, enormously talented team we have built here at NYU Langone, but is also a testament to what is possible when an institution goes all in on saving lives," said Robert Montgomery, MD, DPhil, the H. Leon Pachter, MD, Professor of Surgery at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, chair of the Department of Surgery, and director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute.

NYU Langone Health's kidney, liver, and lung transplant programs are ranked No. 1 for quality in New York State, according to the federal Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients (SRTR). Notable achievements from 2025:

• The kidney transplant program, which is also No. 2 for quality nationwide, had the highest volume in the state for the fifth consecutive year.
• The heart transplant program maintained the shortest time to transplant in New York City while exceeding national standards in patient survival and waitlist mortality.
• The living-donor kidney and living-donor liver transplant programs had 100 percent patient survival rates after one year.

After joining NYU Langone and founding the Transplant Institute on March 1, 2016, Dr. Montgomery drastically expanded existing kidney and liver transplant programs while adding comprehensive heart, lung, and pediatric transplant programs.

Some milestones for the institute over the decade include:

• Total organ transplants increased from 49 in 2015 to nearly 600 a year on average since 2022.
• Kidney transplants increased from 29 in 2015 to over 300 a year since 2021.
• Liver transplants increased from 19 in 2015 to over 120 in 2024 and 2025.
• The heart and lung transplant programs, launched in 2018, now each perform over 70 transplants annually.
• A dedicated pancreas transplant program was launched in 2018.

The institute is one of the only transplant centers in the region to transplant kidneys, livers, hearts, and lungs in both adults and children.

It has become a leader in transplant innovation by performing the first gene-edited pig-to-human kidney transplant (2021) and the first fully robotic double-lung transplant (2024). It also launched the first FDA-approved clinical trial for xenotransplantation (2025), performed the first hepatitis-C-positive heart transplants in New York City (2018) and performed the nation's first donation after circulatory death procedure, which involves organ donation after the heart stops, using a normothermic perfusion technique (2020).

The institute built comprehensive pediatric liver and kidney transplant programs at Hassenfeld Children's Hospital at NYU Langone and achieved zero waitlist mortality, compared with a national average of 0.7 for pediatric kidney and 5.3 for pediatric liver transplants. Additionally, the Pediatric Heart Failure and Transplant Program gets new hearts to patients faster than regional or national averages.

"Transplantation takes specific expertise and a dedicated team of faculty and staff that push themselves and the team forward for their patients," said Sapna Mehta, MD, clinical director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute. "We have built a program at NYU Langone that is constantly raising the bar for innovation and going above and beyond for our patients to get them back to health. We are so proud of what we have built over the past decade and what we continue to do to solve problems for the people who need a new organ."

Learn more about the NYU Langone Transplant Institute.

Media Inquiries
Colin DeVries
Phone: 212-404-3588
[email protected]

SOURCE NYU Langone Health