Stranger’s Lifesaving Liver Donation Helps AdventHealth Launch Groundbreaking Transplant Program

 A four-year-old boy is alive and thriving thanks to a break though liver transplant through AdventHealth’s new living donor liver transplant program. A 23-year-old woman — who had never met the child — volunteered to donate part of her liver after seeing his story on Facebook.

“Knowing that I was able to help, not only him but (also) his family is really a blessing,” said donor, Sophie Byroade. “I guess, technically, I gave him the gift of life and it’s just kind of surreal that I did that. It’s very cool! And the staff (at AdventHealth Transplant Institute) is amazing. If I were to do this again, I wouldn’t go anywhere else.”

Both the donor and the boy, Nolan Smith, along with his family, traveled from Jacksonville to the AdventHealth Transplant Institute in Orlando for the procedure, where a specialized transplant team, working with pediatric experts from AdventHealth for Children, performed the lifesaving surgery. Both are recovering well.

The surgery marked the first living donor liver transplant performed through the institute’s new program, the only one of its kind in Central Florida and one of only a handful in the state and one of only 11 in the southeast. 

“This is one of the most complex procedures in medicine,” said Dr. Ryan Day, a transplant surgeon and director of the institute’s living donor program. “Having the capability to perform it puts our team in rarefied air and now that we’re doing this surgery, there’s nothing else that we can’t do. What matters most is what this makes possible for our patients, giving more people the chance to get expert care sooner and closer to home, surrounded by the support they need.”

For families facing advanced liver disease, time can make a critical difference. Living donor transplantation allows patients to receive a transplant sooner rather than waiting for a deceased donor organ. This expands access to lifesaving, whole-person care for patients across Central Florida and throughout the state.

During a living donor transplant, surgeons remove a portion of a healthy donor’s liver and transplant it into the recipient. The liver regenerates, allowing both the donor’s and recipient’s livers to grow back to full size within weeks. With the critical need for organ donors across the country, living donation makes more organs available for patients who are on waiting lists and desperately need a transplant.

“This story is a powerful reminder of the compassion that exists in our communities across Florida,” said Mary Albers, vice president of AdventHealth Transplant Institute. “A young woman stepped forward to help someone she had never met, and our team had the privilege of helping make that extraordinary gift possible.”

The living donor liver transplant program builds on the legacy of the AdventHealth Transplant Institute, Central Florida’s only solid-organ transplant program, which has performed more than 7,000 transplants since 1973 and cares for patients from communities across Florida. 

“For children with advanced liver disease, timing can make a critical difference,” said Dr. Dellys Soler, medical director of pediatric advanced hepatology and liver transplant at AdventHealth for Children. “Living donor transplantation gives us another way to help young patients get the care they need sooner and continue growing and thriving.”

To learn more about becoming a living liver donor or to refer a patient, visit AdventHealthTransplantInstitute.com.