Trailblazers in Kidney Health: Dr. Eduardo Santiago Delpín

^{Image Credit: School of Medicine University of Puerto Rico}

Before kidney transplantation was available in Puerto Rico, one doctor dared to dream. Dr. Eduardo Santiago Delpín imagined bringing this lifesaving surgery to the island. But he didn’t stop there. He made it happen. This is how Dr. Delpín did it.

Dr. Delpín was born in Puerto Rico in 1941. He studied medicine at the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine and later trained in kidney transplant surgery and immunobiology at the University of Minnesota.

Now, Dr. Delpín had the skills to perform kidney transplants. He returned to Puerto Rico in the early 1970s, ready to make a difference. 

At the time, Puerto Rican patients had to travel far away to get a transplant, something many families could not afford.

“I came back [to Puerto Rico] with my eyes full of stars and feeling that I could do kidneys the next day. It was not to be,” Dr. Delpín told ASTS. “There was no infrastructure.”

Dr. Delpín gathered a group of healthcare professionals to create a new transplant system from scratch. It took five years, but the effort paid off. In 1977, he opened the first organ transplant program in Puerto Rico.

This gave people on the island a better chance of receiving a lifesaving kidney transplant.

Learn more about kidney care throughout the decades. 

Dr. Delpín also wanted to share information about transplantation with the Spanish-speaking world. But most medical texts were only available in English. This made it difficult for doctors and students in Latin America to learn about organ transplants.

To bridge this gap, he wrote the first-ever textbook on organ transplantation in Spanish. This groundbreaking work gave doctors, students, and families across Latin America the tools they needed to understand kidney health and transplants.

Find NKF’s kidney health resources in Spanish.

Dr. Delpín’s efforts didn’t stop in Puerto Rico. He helped shape kidney care across the region by:

• Creating the Latin American and Caribbean Transplant Society, a professional network of transplant doctors, surgeons, and researchers that fosters collaboration and improves patient care.
• Helping establish the Latin American Transplant Registry, a system that tracks transplant outcomes and provides data to improve success rates.
• Launching the Pan-American Society of Dialysis and Transplants, an organization of experts dedicated to advancing treatments for people with kidney failure.

These organizations built connections across countries, giving more doctors the tools and connections to save countless lives.

Dr. Eduardo Santiago Delpín proves that one person’s vision can transform an entire field of medicine. His work opened doors that had never existed before, saving thousands of lives and inspiring generations of doctors to dream bigger. Dr. Delpín’s legacy continues in every kidney transplant performed in Puerto Rico and across Latin America.