Pediatric Kidney Transplant Program

Description of Services

Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC performed its first pediatric kidney transplant in 1964. Since then, Children's transplant teams have performed kidney transplants on hundreds of children and teenagers, making Children's one of the most active pediatric kidney transplant centers in the world. The program's objective is to restore health and wellness to children suffering from end-stage renal disease.

Children's Pediatric Kidney Transplant Program, managed collaboratively by the Divisions of Pediatric Nephrology and Transplantation (the UPMC Thomas E. Starzl Transplantation Institute), is one of the first programs in the world that used tacrolimus as its primary immunosuppressive agent. The use of tacrolimus has enabled the program to achieve long-term patient and graft survival rates that are among the best in the world, and also allowed the majority of children to be withdrawn from chronic maintenance steroids. The current regimens, which employ preconditioning with alemtuzumab, allow complete avoidance of steroids after transplantation.

The kidney transplant program at Children's includes living donor and deceased donor kidney transplantation and liver/kidney and multivisceral/kidney transplantation. In addition, Children's performed the world's first living-related pediatric kidney/bone marrow transplant.