This couple launched a nonprofit to democratize transplant information

Five years ago, when he was 31 years old, Tristan Mace was in a coma in the hospital. The venture capitalist and tech entrepreneur had initially thought he had pneumonia but soon learned his heart was failing.

That left Jordan Mace, his wife who was three months pregnant with their first child at the time, to make a big decision: Should Tristan get a heart transplant?

She told us she was handed a binder with an overwhelming amount of information and given 24 hours to decide. It had answers to everything from whether a transplant recipient can get a tattoo or have a cat to if they can have children, she recalled.

The procedure was successful, but it left the couple with a new mission to make the transplant process easier for other patients and caregivers.

That’s why on May 5 they launched the nonprofit transplants.org, a site that digitizes all those different binders to provide a one-stop shop for reliable, up-to-date transplant information.

“Transplant is a very complex journey,” Tristan said. “We wanted to create a centralized resource that was easily accessible—that was expert-vetted by leading transplant center researchers, surgeons, doctors, transplant coordinators—and make that ubiquitously available to meet somebody wherever they are throughout the journey.”

Binding binders. More than 49,000 people in the US received an organ transplant in 2025, according to nonprofit United Network for Organ Sharing, and the Health Resources and Services Administration reports there are more than 103,000 patients currently on the national waiting list. Around the country, when families are faced with making a transplant decision, they’re handed a similar binder from hospital staff, just like Jordan was. These binders vary from hospital to hospital in length and information included, Tristan said.

In other words, you can get very different advice depending on where you go. The nonprofit’s website is meant to act as a complete landing page for quality transplant information.

To create the site, in 2023, Tristan and Jordan partnered with Oracle on the tech side with the website launch and research as well as 25 transplant centers—including Johns Hopkins Medicine, Stanford Medicine, and Duke Health—where researchers and AI analyzed 100 of these transplantation binders.

“We’re trying to build what the American Cancer Society has built for the cancer patient population,” Tristan said. “It’s around education, it’s around support and care navigation, research and innovation, and patient advocacy.”

The couple has contributed their personal funds to the project and have received a number of external donations as well, Tristan said.

Lasting information. Since it’s online, the digital binder can also continue to provide information to patients after their transplant. This is helpful, Tristan said, because transplantation is an ongoing health journey that doesn’t just end with the surgery.

For example, Tristan said when he was 34 years old, he had to have both of his hips replaced. He was on immunosuppression drugs, so his body continued to accept the heart transplant, but that treatment led to bone decay. The couple wants the website to provide patients and caregivers with information from the beginning about different medication options so they can avoid more extreme side effects like this.

“If we can democratize that level of information, if we can allow systems to talk to each other in a different way, it can actually have those quality-of-life impacts,” Jordan said.

It also allows the information to be kept up to date when new studies are published, as digital pages are easier to change than paper copies in individual binders. Additionally, it could make it easier to offer these resources in different languages.

“We’re hoping to maybe inspire others to learn more about it or to sign up and register to be an organ donor on your license,” Jordan said. “We’re excited to just talk about the good that can come out of transplant.”