Anzhen Hospital, one of China’s largest cardiac surgery centers, employs a number of domestically and internationally renowned heart surgeons. The hospital was among the first batch approved by the Ministry of Health to carry out heart and lung transplants.⁷¹

This hospital has over 4,000 employees, including 600 personnel with senior professional titles and over 900 with intermediate titles. The hospital has 1,500 beds, including 211 intensive care beds. It has 31 operating rooms equipped with one hundred, one thousand, and ten-thousand-level laminar flow clean air technology.

Anzhen Hospital leads the cardiovascular field in China and is one of the country’s largest cardiac surgery centers.⁷² It employs a number of domestically and internationally renowned heart surgeons. It has carried out heart, lung, and combined heart-lung transplants for many years, with the number of transplants increasing year on year.

The Thoracic Surgery Department successfully conducted the first single-lung transplant in 1995 and the first double-lung transplant in 1998. It grew tremendously after 2000, increasing the number of lung transplants performed and the postoperative survival rate.⁷³

Qu Songlei,⁷⁴ head of the Thoracic Surgery Department, studied thoracic surgery and lung transplantation in the United States in 1999 and 2000. With rich experience from performing clinical work in the subject for more than 20 years, he can perform many complex procedures, including lung transplants. He has published a number of academic papers and participated in the writing and editing of multiple monographs and textbooks. He has won first prize of the Beijing Science and Technology Progress Award.

The Cardiac Surgery Department includes the Beijing Heart Transplant Center and specializes in treating severe valvular heart disease and end-stage heart disease. It has 50 beds and performs 1,000 surgeries per year. The department is among the top in the country in the heart transplant field, including its development of new surgical procedures, research programs, and number of clinical cases. It also holds the record in northern China for the longest patient survival time. In 1992, the department performed China’s second heart transplant (the first took place in Shanghai in 1978). Fourteen years later, it started a nationwide period of development in heart transplantation. The department performed the world’s first four combined heart, bone marrow, and stem cell transplants as an innovation in the knowledge and techniques of improving immune tolerance. Transplant recipients experienced less rejection of the donor heart while maintaining resistance against viruses and bacteria. Thus, lesser quantities of immunological drugs were needed. This result can potentially be extended to the fields of lung and other actual organ transplants.⁷⁵

Xu Meng is the founder of the Beijing Heart Transplant and Valvular Surgery Treatment Center, vice director of the Heart Surgery Department, and a PhD advisor. He studied as a senior visiting scholar at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and is a member of the Chinese Medical Association’s Beijing Organ Transplant Society. One of his specialties is in heart transplants for the treatment of end-stage heart failure. He has independently completed nearly 10,000 surgeries, with over 800 operations every year. He has published more than 100 papers in SCI and China’s core medical journals. He is in charge of more than 10 research projects at or above the provincial and ministerial levels. Meanwhile, he is involved in multiple projects under the National Natural Science Foundation and the Twelfth Five-Year Plan.⁷⁶