Before a donor heart can be transplanted, it must be effectively reanimated to make sure its tissues are healthy and it is fit to resume beating in the recipient’s chest. This can be a problem when the donor and recipient are babies, since a critical piece of equipment that does the reanimation is designed for adult-sized hearts. The result: babies are limited to receiving hearts from brain-dead donors whose hearts don’t stop beating while they’re in the donor’s chest. Enter Dr. Joseph Turek, chief of pediatric cardiac surgery at Duke Health. Turek and his colleagues have developed equipment that can reanimate baby-sized hearts, expanding the donor pool by up to 20%. It was first used in 2025 to successfully give a 3-month-old baby a new heart. “We do about 500 heart transplants a year in children,” says Turek. “That number could go up by 100, which is pretty incredible.”
