The heart transplant team at Baltimore based-Johns Hopkins Medicine broke a new record in 2024, performing 65 adult transplants, more than doubling the team’s 2023 total.
The milestone also broke Johns Hopkins Hospital’s previous record of 27 heart transplants in a single year, according to a Feb. 11 news release from the health system.
Kavita Sharma, MD, director of heart failure and cardiac transplantation, spoke to Becker’s about the forces behind the heart transplant program’s growth.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What factors contributed to doubling the program’s previous heart transplant record, from 27 to 65?
Dr. Kavita Sharma: The growth we’ve seen is a testament to our amazing multi-disciplinary team at Hopkins, and our shared mission to provide the highest quality and latest in heart failure care to as many patients as possible — specifically to those who have advanced heart failure.
Over the past five years, we have strategically built the right team with expertise in novel strategies to expand our recipient pool and donor acceptance criteria. I’m very proud of the team that we’ve grown. We have 11 full-time advanced heart failure-trained faculty, three full-time advanced heart failure transplant surgeons and an incredible nursing team.
Some of our growth strategies have included expanding our age range consideration for heart transplantation. We had more patients transplanted between ages 65-70 last year than any prior year. We have also taken on patients with increased co-morbidities, utilizing novel strategies to increase their post-transplant success. We are now evaluating adult congenital heart disease patients for heart transplantation and often dual-organ transplantation who previously were considered too high risk at our center. Furthermore, we developed a desensitization program to help patients whose immunologic status would have precluded them from transplantation previously.
From a donor organ standpoint, we performed the first donation-after-circulatory-death transplant in the state of Maryland. More than 30% of our transplants in 2024 came from DCD donors.
So really, our growth and sustained outcomes came down to having the right team in place, a unified mission, and thoughtfully and strategically broadening our criteria around both recipients and donor selection.
Q: What were some of the biggest challenges Johns Hopkins had to address to make this growth happen?
KS: The first challenge to overcome was getting everybody on board with the idea of pushing some of our historic boundaries around recipient and donor risk profiles.
Hopkins has typically performed 20 to 25 heart transplants a year, and did so well. With growth always come challenges, but here we were proposing growth both in volume and in the traditional risk profiles of patients and donors.
We overcame those challenges by growing our team to include those with expertise from prior institutions, welcoming input from key thought leaders in the field, and rigorously reviewing data to help guide our protocol changes. The next set of challenges, which we continue to tackle, are the actual operational logistics of having a higher volume of patients, referrals, evaluations and surgeries. Our goal at the outset was to be able to provide more patients with individualized, personalized, state-of-the-art care without compromising quality, which I am proud to say we have accomplished.
We have sustained excellent one-year survival for three years consecutively, including our milestone year in 2024. Our growth is a testament to the incredible multidisciplinary teams at Johns Hopkins and the tremendous support we’ve received from our leadership.
Q: What priorities do you have for the advanced heart failure and transplant team in 2025?
KS: We hope to continue to provide state-of-the-art, personalized, heart failure care to as many patients with heart failure as possible, both regionally and nationally.
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