A single organ donor can save up to 8 lives and improve more than 75 others through tissue donations. The full list of what can be donated is broader than most people realize, spanning vital organs, a wide range of tissues, and even composite body parts like hands and faces.
Organs That Can Be Donated After Death
Six solid organs are routinely recovered from deceased donors: the heart, both lungs, the liver, both kidneys, the pancreas, and the intestines. Because a person has two kidneys and two lungs, and because the liver can be split between recipients, a single donor can potentially provide organs to eight different people.
Each organ has a different survival window once it’s removed from the body. The heart and lungs are the most time-sensitive, lasting only 4 to 6 hours outside the body. The liver remains viable for 8 to 12 hours, intestines for 8 to 16 hours, and the pancreas for 12 to 18 hours. Kidneys are the most resilient, staying viable for 24 to 36 hours. These tight windows are why organ recovery teams work quickly and why proximity between donor and recipient hospitals matters.
Tissues That Can Be Donated
Tissue donation is less well known than organ donation, but it helps far more people. Tissues that can be recovered and transplanted include:
- Corneas: the clear tissue covering the front of the eye, transplanted to restore vision
- Skin: used as temporary grafts for patients with severe burns, covering wounds to reduce pain, prevent infection, and promote healing while the patient’s own skin regenerates
- Bone: used in reconstructive surgery and orthopedic procedures
- Cartilage: used to repair joints and other structural damage
- Tendons: commonly used in ligament repair, including ACL reconstruction
- Heart valves: transplanted into patients with valve disease, often children with congenital heart defects
- Blood vessels (veins and arteries): used in coronary bypass surgery and other vascular procedures
Corneas and tissues must be recovered within 24 hours of death. Corneal tissue can be stored for up to 14 days before transplantation. Other tissues like bone, skin, and tendons can be processed and preserved for much longer, making tissue banks an important part of the supply chain for burn centers, orthopedic surgeons, and cardiac surgeons alike.
Donated skin plays a particularly critical role in burn care. For patients with extensive burns who don’t have enough healthy skin for grafting, donor skin acts as a biological dressing. It closes the wound temporarily, controls infection, and buys time for the patient’s own skin to heal enough for permanent grafts. It’s also used for patients with severe soft tissue loss from trauma or flesh-destroying infections.
What Living Donors Can Give
You don’t have to be deceased to be a donor. Living donation is possible for several organs because the body can function with less tissue than it was born with, or because certain organs regenerate.
The most common living donation is a single kidney. Your remaining kidney compensates by growing slightly and increasing its filtering capacity. A segment of the liver is the second most common, since the liver is one of the few organs that regenerates to near its original size within weeks. Less commonly, living donors can give one lobe of a lung, part of the pancreas, or a portion of the intestine. These partial-organ donations are rarer and typically happen between family members or close matches.
Face, Hands, and Other Composite Donations
A newer category of transplantation involves what surgeons call vascularized composite allografts. These are complex body parts made up of multiple tissue types (skin, muscle, bone, nerves, and blood vessels) transplanted as a single unit. The list includes the face, arms, hands, the larynx (voice box), and the abdominal wall.
These transplants are rare and technically demanding, but they’ve become increasingly viable over the past two decades. One important distinction: registering as an organ donor does not automatically authorize donation of these body parts. Because of the visible and personal nature of face and limb donation, separate explicit consent from the donor or their family is required. Donor registration forms are gradually being updated to address this, but the conversation with family remains especially important for anyone open to this type of donation.
Who Can Be a Donor
There’s no strict age cutoff for donation. Newborns and elderly adults have all been donors, though age does affect which organs are suitable. Kidney graft outcomes decline when donors are over 60, and lung donors ideally are under 55. The size of the organ also matters, which is why very small children most often receive organs from other young donors, though older children and adults can sometimes match as well. Children can also receive partial organs, like a piece of a liver or lung.
Very few medical conditions rule out donation entirely. The absolute disqualifiers are active infections that could be transmitted to the recipient, such as HIV, active tuberculosis, or rabies, and most active cancers. Certain conditions rule out specific organs rather than all donation. Cirrhosis disqualifies someone from liver donation but not necessarily kidney donation. Diabetes rules out pancreas donation but leaves other organs unaffected. In nearly every case, medical teams evaluate each organ individually at the time of death rather than making a blanket yes-or-no decision based on a donor’s medical history.
The practical takeaway: almost no one should count themselves out. Registering as a donor allows transplant teams to determine at the appropriate time what can be used. Even when some organs aren’t viable, tissues like corneas, bone, or skin very often are.