Ailani already has her second chance

This is Fight For Life Club's active campaign right now: 4 children waiting for a pediatric liver transplant at the INP. Their families have authorized us to share their first names — Cassiel, Madelyne, Elizabeth, and Eliel. Their full stories and photos will follow as soon as each family authorizes that step, just as was done with Ailani when her time came.

Ailani's story is that of one girl, but it is also the story of a much bigger problem: every year, somewhere in Mexico, a child develops a liver disease that only a transplant can solve. Understanding why helps explain why Fight For Life Club's work is urgent.

Approximate distribution according to international registries (United States, Europe) — no equivalent consolidated registry exists for Mexico, so these figures should be read as international reference, not national data.

Biliary atresia — a progressive obstruction of the bile ducts present from birth — is by far the most frequent cause. Even when the Kasai surgery (a procedure that seeks to restore bile flow) is initially successful, most children will eventually need a transplant: long-term follow-up studies show that survival with the native liver drops steadily over time, from 40-89% at 5 years to 22-35% beyond 20 years, depending on the series and population studied. Without any treatment, the disease progresses to cirrhosis and liver failure in early childhood.

Source: CENATRA National Transplant Registry, via Leal-Leyte et al. (2025), Pediatric Transplantation — cumulative decade figures, not annual.

The response to this gap must be verifiable and systemic: transparent allocation rules, independent audits of decisions, public data broken down by age, and a serious review of the priority given to pediatric recipients. The living-donor transplant program the INP started in 2025 — backed by Fight For Life Club — is a complementary path that is already saving lives today, but it does not replace the system's obligation to correct these inequities in deceased-donor organ allocation.

When a child needs a liver transplant, there are two paths: waiting for an organ from a deceased donor, or receiving part of a liver from a living donor, usually an adult family member. The liver has a unique capacity in the human body: it can regenerate. The donor gives between 40% and 50% of their liver, which grows back within months; and the transplanted segment grows inside the recipient until it covers all the function their body needs.

The donor's liver regenerates; the transplanted graft grows until it covers the recipient's function.

The scientific evidence is compelling: children transplanted with a living donor have better survival than those waiting for a deceased-donor organ, in part because they don't have to wait for a compatible organ to appear while their disease progresses.

Discharge day: Ailani's uncle — her donor — and Ailani, hand in hand, walking out together from the National Institute of Pediatrics (INP) after the transplant. This is the most honest image of what a living-donor liver transplant means: two people, one single walk out the door.

None of these achievements would be possible without the institution that makes them possible every day: the National Institute of Pediatrics (INP). Founded on November 6, 1970 by decree of then-president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz — originally as the Children's Hospital of the Mexican Institution for Child Assistance (IMAN) — the INP adopted its current name and status in 1983, formally becoming one of Mexico's National Institutes of Health: decentralized public bodies dedicated to high-specialty medical care, scientific research, and workforce training.

Today, more than five decades later, the INP is a national and international reference in pediatrics. According to institutional figures, more than 95% of the patients it treats require third-level or high-complexity services — that is, the most complex cases in the country, the ones other hospitals cannot resolve.

Source: CENATRA, BEI-CENATRA Statistical Bulletin, Vol. X, January-December 2025 (SIRNT, as of January 15, 2026).

CENATRA's official 2025 figures confirm something extraordinary: of the 14 living-donor liver transplants performed in all of Mexico that year, the INP performed 5 — more than a third of the national total — putting it in first place among the seven hospitals in the country that performed at least one, ahead of social-security institutions and private hospitals with far greater installed capacity. And there's an even more revealing fact: 100% of those 14 living-donor liver transplants were performed on children ages 0 to 9; none on an adult. In Mexico, living-donor liver transplantation is, today, an almost exclusively pediatric procedure — and the INP leads that effort.

This national first place is not the merit of a single institution: it is the tangible result of the agreement and alliance between the INP and Fight For Life Club, a shared effort in which each party contributes what the other could not sustain alone. The INP provides the clinical infrastructure, the medical team, and the surgical decision-making; Fight For Life Club provides supplies, specialized equipment, and financial backing, case after case. Dr. Antonio Medina, of the INP, put it best in the previous section: "Thanks to Fight for Life Club, we have increased our capacity to perform pediatric transplants." The INP's national leadership in 2025 is, at bottom, proof that well-structured public-private alliances work — and that when they do, they transform real lives.

The need remains great: at the close of 2025, 190 people of all ages remained on the national liver waiting list, of whom at least 48 were girls, boys, and adolescents ages 0 to 19 — one in every four.

The INP's Surgery and Transplant department is part of its high-specialty offerings, along with oncology, cardiology, nephrology, hepatology, pediatric critical care, and dozens of other subspecialties. In its 2023 report, the Institute documented 8 deceased-donor kidney transplants, 5 living-donor kidney transplants, 3 deceased-donor liver transplants, and 37 bone marrow transplants — a total of 62 transplant and high-complexity procedures in a single year.

But the INP's contribution goes beyond direct medical care: it is also a teaching institution. As a teaching hospital, it trains specialists in pediatrics, genetics, dentistry, and dozens of subspecialties, with completion rates that in recent years have exceeded 90-100% in several programs. Every doctor trained there multiplies specialized pediatric care capacity throughout Mexico, not just within its own walls.

On surgery day, two operating rooms work in parallel: in one, the team carefully removes the donor's liver portion (usually a parent). In the other, the child's diseased liver is removed and prepared to receive the new segment. It is a medical choreography of the highest precision, involving dozens of specialists.

From the donor's operating room to the recipient's: the 6 steps of living-donor liver transplant surgery.

Before reaching that day, both the child and the potential donor go through a rigorous evaluation process that can take several weeks, designed to protect the safety of both.

No donor reaches the operating room without going through these 5 stages of medical and psychosocial evaluation.

Surgery day is not the final goal: it's the start of a new stage. Both Ailani and her donor uncle had different recoveries from one another, and both require long-term medical follow-up — the same path that the 4 children hoping to follow in her footsteps are walking today.

For the donor, fatigue and discomfort at the incision site can persist for several weeks, though most return to normal life within a few months thanks to liver regeneration. For the child recipient, the challenge is different: learning to live with an immune system "silenced" by anti-rejection medications, which requires constant infection monitoring, periodic lab checkups, and, over time, increasing autonomy in caring for their own health.

Neither story ends in the operating room. That's why Fight For Life Club doesn't just fund the surgery: it also supports the family through recovery, because a second chance at life is built day by day, not just on transplant day.