Living Donor Program

The liver is a truly remarkable organ with the capacity to grow back to its full size if a piece is removed. Due to the high level of need for liver donors and the low level of available organs to meet the need, the first living donor liver transplant in the United States was completed in 1989. Since then, living donor liver transplantation has become a common procedure to help individuals with diseased livers.

Our surgeons are leaders in performing living donor liver transplantprocedures, where a piece of a living person's liver is removed and placed in the body of a person with diseased liver tissue.

About the Procedure

We coordinate our transplantation procedures closely with adult surgeons at the University of Southern California’s University Hospital, who perform the surgery for the liver donor. This is an illustration of the adult's procedure:

The liver section removed from the donor's body is then delivered to our surgeons, who remove the diseased liver from the child and perform the transplant operation here at our hospital, where we offer state-of-the-art care for children. This is an illustration of the child's procedure: