National Center for Child Health and Development

“We promote advanced medicine and innovative research in health care for infants, children, adolescents, young adults and their families.”

Our mission at the National Center for Child Health and Development (NCCHD) is to advance the health and well-being of infants, children, adolescents, young adults and their mothers through providing first-rate clinical care, innovative research, and education.

We offer the highest-quality medical care supported by new and original research. Our hospital and research institute have worked together to create exciting innovations in medicine and health care, such as establishing induced pluripotent stem (iPS) or embryonic stem (ES) cells for biomedical applications, conducting clinical studies at our hospital, and advancing global research in maternal and child health. We aim to forge ahead with our collaborative research in the years to come.

Several new departments were created in the NCCHD with the aim of bolstering the clinical research and development activities of both our hospital and research institute. Our hospice care facility, “Momiji House for children and young adults,” which was founded in April 2016, has gotten off to a strong start. This new facility provides medical care and support for patients while also helping families to come to terms with their child’s condition and prognosis and to enable them to spend quality time with their child.

All the staff at the NCCHD are united in their aspiration to enhance the quality of life of the patients. The high standard of health care and research at NCCHD reflect this ambition. We always take a professional, honest, and respectful approach to our patients and their families and provide comprehensive support to the children, adolescents, and young adults in our care. In our day-to-day work, we constantly keep in mind the contribution we can make to clinical research and how we can shape medical and health care, the health and quality of the life of patients and their families, and society as a whole.

At the NCCHD we also invest in future health care through educating, training, and supporting the next generation of doctors and healthcare workers who will play an important role in medicine, patient care, health, social services, research, and education in the years to come.

We are very proud of having been chosen as one of the world’s 30 Most Technologically Advanced Children’s Hospitals last year. Thank you for your interest and support in our center. We always welcome opportunities for collaboration and hope we can work together towards the shared goal of achieving accessible, high-quality health care for all children and their families.

Founding Principle
The National Center for Child Health and Development consists of a hospital, Center for Clinical Research and Development and research institute which cooperate closely together to promote the health and wellbeing of future generations through medical care and research.

Our Mission
To pioneer innovative methods in health care and the use and development of cutting-edge medical technologies.
To promote research and study in the field of child health and development.
To develop specialists in the field of child and family health, and to provide education and training in order to disseminate knowledge of the field.
To collect information on child health and development and raise awareness of the field within society. Center for Organ Transplantation
Our mission is to provide excellent care and outcomes to patients with severe liver, kidney, and intestinal diseases.

Medical services
Our staff and colleagues from related departments work hard to deliver high-quality treatment and protect the health of patients. We have performed kidney transplantations since 2000 and living-donor liver transplants (LDLT) for severe cases of liver disease since 2005. We conduct liver transplantations, including cadaveric liver transplantation, around 45 to 50 times a year. This number is high, even by international standards, and accounts for half of all child liver transplant cases in Japan. Although cadaver-donor transplants predominate in overseas cases of liver transplantation, living-donor transplants are the primary source of transplants in Japan due to a significant shortage of donors.

The graft survival rate among children is one of the highest in the world, and the 5-year survival rate is 92%. The complication rate for donors is exceptionally low. Furthermore, the innovative surgical procedure in which an adult donor liver is split to proportionally match the patient’s weight—allowing for a customized transplant—was developed at our center and is a hallmark of our center’s excellence in child organ transplantation.

Advanced/specialized treatments
We recently started a hepatocyte transplantation (HCT) program and performed the first HCT for a neonate suffering from metabolic liver disease in August 2013. We currently undertake laparoscopic hepatectomy in live donor operations.

Pediatric Liver Surgery and Transplantation E-learning
We would like to introduce our activities from 10 years experiences as a surgical textbook through the website (Pediatric Liver Surgery and Transplantation E-learning). Organ Transplantation Center of National Center for Child Health and Development, Tokyo, Japan, has launched in 2005. Since then, we continue to focus on pediatric liver transplantation and total number of liver transplants reached to 400 cases by the end of March 2016.
In this textbook, we demonstrate our innovative surgical procedure in pediatric living donor liver transplantation and liver surgery, including standard techniques and complicated case presentations with beautiful surgical videos.
We hope this text is useful in maintaining high quality surgery in all pediatric patients and in avoiding unrecognized changes in surgical strategy for all involved in this field.

'Pediatric Liver Transplantation and Liver surgery' has limited access.
Please contact; transplant@ncchd.go.jp
you will have　ID and password.