--- title: There Were A Record-Breaking Number of Organ Transplants in 2017 description: There were a record number of transplants in 2017, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. canonical: https://time.com/5097377/record-breaking-organ-transplants-2017/ author: Alexandra Sifferlin article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-01-10T21:57:18.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:53:45.570Z article:section: Health og:title: Organ Transplants Hit an All-Time High in 2017 og:description: But it’s a bittersweet win og:url: https://time.com/5097377/record-breaking-organ-transplants-2017/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6f517b91562b1af5/6988f7cedb2987025725e5ae/orgn.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 5760 og:image:height: 3240 og:image:alt: Human Organ Transplantation og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Organ Transplants Hit an All-Time High in 2017 twitter:description: But it’s a bittersweet win twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6f517b91562b1af5/6988f7cedb2987025725e5ae/orgn.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Organ Transplants Hit an All-Time High in 2017\. 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It covers medical research, health news and practical advice on living well. #### Where can I get reliable health news by email? Health Matters is TIME's weekday health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free weekday newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-health-2026q3/newsletters?i=68c964d6-141e-4d24-b46b-8b5c4c1e8b5f&cr=time-nl-health-2026q3-v1) ## Video: How Medicine is Trying to Solve a Shortage of Organ Donors [Watch (HLS stream): How Medicine is Trying to Solve a Shortage of Organ Donors](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/MTImRcut.m3u8) (3:21)  _Published 2017-10-25. Doctors at Penn are testing the use of hepatitis c-infected hearts for transplants._ by [Alexandra Sifferlin](https://time.com/author/alexandra-sifferlin/) ## Alexandra Sifferlin Jan 10, 2018 9:57 PM UTC  Human Organ Transplantation on ambulance. Human Organ Transplantation on ambulance. Getty Images by [Alexandra Sifferlin](https://time.com/author/alexandra-sifferlin/) ## Alexandra Sifferlin Jan 10, 2018 9:57 PM UTC Last year, organs were recovered from 10,281 deceased donors—more than a 3% increase from 2016 and a 27% increase over the last 10 years. Those organs contributed to the 34,768 transplants performed in 2017 using organs from both deceased and living donors—a new record for organ transplants in the United States. The reasons why are both hopeful and concerning. The new data comes from the [United Network for Organ Sharing](https://unos.org/) (UNOS), a non-profit organization that manages the United States’s organ transplant system through a contract with the federal government. The number of transplant performed in 2017 marks the fifth consecutive record-setting year for transplants. “The number of transplants is directly related to the number of donors,” says Dr. David Klassen, the chief medical officer of UNOS. “I think who can be a donor has really evolved over the years. The transplant community as a whole has done a really good job looking beyond the usual places of who can be a donor.” Researchers are [now finding ways](http://time.com/4996657/heart-transplant-hepatitis-c/) to recover and use organs that would normally be discarded. At Penn Medicine in Philadelphia, there are ongoing clinical trials where people are given organs from donors who are infected with hepatitis C. After the transplant, recipients take a drug that will clear them of the disease. So far, the trial is having positive results. UNOS also reported that there were a record number of organs recovered for the four most common transplants: kidney, liver, heart and lung transplants. Another reason for the increase is the rise in drug overdose deaths across the U.S. “These can become organ donors quite successfully,” says Klassen. “Those that are dying from overdose tend to be otherwise fairly healthy and younger. I think it turns an in awful situation into some good.” UNOS also saw increases in recovered organs from people age 50 and older and organs from donors after circulatory death (the irreversible loss of function of the heart and lungs). Despite the record number of transplants, the number of people on the organ donation waiting list still far exceeds the number of suitable donors. Currently, more than [115,398](https://unos.org/data/) people are waiting for a transplant; UNOS estimates that every ten minutes, someone new is added. Still, Klassen also notes that most Americans are now registered as organ donors. “There is generally broad support in the U.S. for the concept of organ donation and transplantation,” he says. “It’s a voluntary system, which I think speaks to the generosity of society as a whole. We want to maintain that.” ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] You're looking into a tunnel that's just dark. You don't know what's going to be at the other end. There certainly was no light. There's no light until the night that they came and told me that I was going to be transplanted. That's when it all changed. Tom had been waiting for a heart transplant for a while And he was otherwise relatively healthy. And so we thought that he would be and ideal first candidate. And I seen Dr. Maclean many times in clinic. when I was hospitalize waiting on the regular list for the heart. She came in and explained this new program, the USHER Program. [ MUSIC ] Many of the patients on the wait list actually die on the wait list. Therefore, it's in everyone's best interest to find a way to increase the pool of donors that we have. 500 to 1, 000 donors they're hard to [ UNKNOWN ] because they have a history of hepatitis C. The drugs that are now used for hepatitis C, upwards of 95 % of the patients who receive these drugs, Are cured. These are the pills that I take in the morning when I get up. It's enough to choke a horse but I do it. I've read a lot about hepsy, what the symptoms would be if you had it and it wasn't anything to be fearful of. I just figured to go for it and it wasn't until the third day out of surgery That the hepatitis C showed up in my blood stream. They started me on the new drug, which is called Zepatier, and by the end of that week, there was no trace. [ MUSIC ] We've certainly come a long way since 1967 when the first transplant was done in South Africa. Time. And one of the perils of the first heart transplant was that we weren't able to control the immune system well enough. So those patients tended to succumb from either rejection or from infection. So over the past few decades we've gotten so much better at using our immunosuppression drugs in order to make sure that our patients don't reject. Where we are vastly limited is in that donor pool, where we haven't had more and more donors, which is why this study is so important. All right, come on let's get your picture taken, come on. I'm hoping that some time in the future we'll have better therapies for heart failure so that people won't need transplants. But in the meantime while they do, if it turns out that the study goes really well, that patients are doing well, that we follow them along, For years and may do just as well as other people. It will be amazing. It would revolutionize heart transplant. 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