One year on: First partial heart transplant baby proves procedure's success

Owen’s parents Tayler and Nick Monroe spend time with him after he underwent the world’s first partial heart transplant in April 2022 just 17 days after he was born. — Photos: TNS

In 2022, Duke Health surgeons in North Carolina, United States, made history when they successfully performed the world’s first partial heart transplant on a newborn.

Doctors thought the groundbreaking, eight-hour surgery – which fused living arteries and valves from a donor’s heart to a newborn’s heart – could create a new field of cardiac surgery that would spare young patients from numerous risky procedures later in their lives.