Eight internal organs can be transplanted from one person to another: kidneys, liver, heart, lungs, pancreas, intestines, and in more complex procedures, hands and face. Beyond these solid organs, dozens of tissues and several newer composite grafts expand the list considerably. Here’s what can be transplanted today and what each option involves.
The Eight Transplantable Organs
The core list of organs approved for transplantation in the United States includes:
- Kidneys (2)
- Liver
- Lungs (2)
- Heart
- Pancreas
- Intestines
- Hands
- Face
A single deceased donor can provide up to eight life-saving organs if the kidneys and lungs are each counted separately. In practice, not every organ from every donor is usable. Matching depends on blood type, body size, immune compatibility, and how urgently each candidate on the waiting list needs the organ.
How Long Each Organ Survives Outside the Body
Once an organ is removed from the donor, it’s packed in a cold preservation solution to slow cell damage. The clock starts immediately, and each organ has a different window. Hearts and lungs are the most time-sensitive, lasting roughly 4 to 6 hours. Livers and the pancreas can tolerate up to about 12 hours. Kidneys are the most resilient, remaining viable for up to 24 hours under cold storage. These tight windows are a major reason why proximity between donor and recipient hospitals plays such a large role in organ allocation.
One-Year Survival Rates by Organ
Transplant outcomes have improved dramatically over the past few decades. Based on national registry data, one-year patient survival rates are now remarkably high across all major organ types. Kidney transplants lead the way at about 98.6%, followed by liver transplants at 96.5%, heart transplants at 93.3%, and lung transplants at 91.6%. Graft survival, meaning the transplanted organ itself is still functioning at one year, tracks closely behind those patient numbers for each organ.
Lung transplants have the lowest one-year survival of the group, partly because the lungs are constantly exposed to the outside environment through breathing, which increases the risk of infection and rejection.
Organs You Can Donate While Alive
You don’t have to be a deceased donor to give someone an organ. Living donors can provide:
- One kidney: The most common living donation. Your remaining kidney compensates and handles the full workload.
- A segment of the liver: The liver regenerates. Both the donor’s remaining portion and the transplanted segment grow back toward full size within weeks.
- One lobe of a lung, part of the pancreas, or part of the intestine: These are less common and performed at specialized centers.
Living donation is especially important for children. Because organ size matters for a successful transplant, a segment from a living adult donor can sometimes be sized more appropriately than a full organ from a deceased adult. Children also receive priority on the kidney waiting list if they begin dialysis before turning 18.
Tissues That Can Be Transplanted
Beyond whole organs, a wide range of tissues can be donated and transplanted. These include corneas (the clear front layer of the eye), skin, bone, tendons, heart valves, and blood vessels. Tissue transplants are far more common than organ transplants. A single tissue donor can help over 75 recipients.
Living people can donate certain tissues too. Skin removed during cosmetic procedures like a tummy tuck, bone from knee or hip replacements, bone marrow, umbilical cord blood collected after childbirth, and amnion (the membrane surrounding a baby during pregnancy) are all usable. Blood and platelet donations fall into this same category, though they’re managed through a separate system.
Composite Tissue Transplants
Some of the most remarkable transplants involve entire body structures rather than single organs or tissues. These are called vascularized composite allografts, and they involve transferring a complex unit that includes bone, muscle, nerves, skin, and blood vessels all connected together. The transplanted structure needs its own blood supply surgically reconnected to function.
The types performed so far include hand and upper limb transplants (including both arms at once), face transplants, uterus transplants, abdominal wall transplants, penis transplants, and even larynx (voice box) transplants. The first larynx transplant in the United States was performed in 1998. These surgeries are technically demanding and relatively rare compared to standard organ transplants, but the list of composite grafts continues to grow.
Uterus transplants deserve a special mention because they serve a unique purpose: they’re temporary. The organ is transplanted to allow the recipient to carry a pregnancy and is then removed, eliminating the need for lifelong anti-rejection medication.
Multi-Organ Transplants
Sometimes a single organ isn’t enough. Patients with intestinal failure who also have advanced liver disease may need both a new intestine and a new liver transplanted together. In the most extensive cases, called multivisceral transplants, surgeons replace several abdominal organs at once, potentially including the stomach, intestines, liver, and pancreas as a connected unit.
Intestinal transplants on their own are among the rarest. In children, the usual cause is short bowel syndrome from birth defects or complications of prematurity. In adults, it’s more often tied to Crohn’s disease, blood clots in the vessels feeding the gut, trauma, or tumors. Patients typically qualify only after other options, like intravenous nutrition, have caused serious complications such as repeated bloodstream infections or liver damage.
Pig-to-Human Transplants
The shortage of human donor organs has pushed researchers toward genetically modified pig organs as an alternative. In April 2024, a patient at NYU Langone Health received a gene-edited pig kidney alongside a heart pump implant. In November 2024, another patient received a pig kidney with 10 genetic modifications and was able to go home. That kidney was later removed in April 2025 after it stopped working due to complications from an unrelated infection, and the patient returned to dialysis.
As of late 2025, the first formal clinical trial testing pig kidney transplants in patients with end-stage kidney disease is underway at NYU Langone. These are still experimental procedures, but they represent the closest researchers have come to making animal-to-human organ transplants a real option for the more than 100,000 people currently on the U.S. transplant waiting list.
How Donor-Recipient Matching Works
Getting an organ isn’t simply about being next in line. The national matching system, managed by UNOS, screens out candidates who are biologically incompatible with a given donor based on blood type, body size, and immune system markers. From there, the ranking depends on the organ type. For hearts and livers, medical urgency is the dominant factor. For lungs, the system weighs both how sick you are and your projected survival benefit over the next five years. For kidneys, time spent waiting carries significant weight alongside immune compatibility and whether the candidate previously donated a living organ to someone else.
Children receive special consideration across all organ types. Pediatric candidates often move higher on the list, and child-sized organs are preferentially offered to children because proper size matching is critical for the transplant to function well in a smaller body.