The Alliance Conversation Series brings you cost-free, fast-paced collaborative opportunities that highlight successful donation and transplantation practices across the country. Through shared insight, multidisciplinary experts identify solutions to critical challenges affecting the community of practice and actively share them for open discussion and broader knowledge of effective practices.

The Alliance is not an advocacy organization and always intends to maintain an objective and unbiased perspective.

Sessions are designed to be approximately 30-45 minutes in length and encourage real-time feedback and participation from viewers.

Overview: Using DCD hearts has the potential to greatly expand the number of donated hearts shorting the wait times and providing more life-saving transplants for people critically in need of a transplant. Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VCMU) uses a normothermic regional perfusion system to reanimate hearts prior to transplanting them and is one of five centers participating in clinical trials in DCD hearts.

Dr. Shah, VCMU’s professor and Chair of Cardiac Surgery, will provide the early experience of DCD and the feasibility of DCD hearts.