GTS co-founder John Bruens, left, and senior VP of Canadian and international operations Lucas Beraldo inspect a preservation solution from Italy. Photo courtesy of Global Transplant Solutions.
When Global Transplant Solutions (GTS) officially began operations in 2017 in Spartanburg, the hope and intention by co-founders John Bruens and Tim Bruce was to be on the front end of helping meet U.S. demand for different kinds of organ donor transplants.
Now, just nine years later, despite exponential growth, a presence in four states so far, and having just supplied its 500,000th liter of organ preservation solution this September, GTS is running harder than ever to keep up with a growing demand that has no end in sight.
“The demand for transplantable organs, at least for the foreseeable future, will always outweigh the number of organs procured,” Bruens said. “That's why there is a waiting list in the U.S. of over 100,000 people.”
Donor organs needed include hearts, lungs, livers, intestines, pancreas, and
kidneys – plus tissue for eyes/cornea, heart valves, bone and skin, veins & arteries, and nerves.
GTS bridges the gap between organ removal and organ transplant with organ preservation solutions used by professionals to flush and preserve organs prior to transplantation, as well as to help transport organs during the transplant process.
Because transportation of organs is critical, GTS has partnered with SALF, a 100+ year-old sterile solution manufacturer based in Bergamo, Italy, to enhance the usability, storage, quality, and delivery of every solution produced.
“We started in 2017 with just a few employees at the Spark Center in Spartanburg,” Bruens said. “Today, we have approximately 30 employees at our Spartanburg headquarters and have expanded our operations with three additional distribution centers in Ohio, Texas, and Nevada.”
When asked how much demand for their organ transplant solution has increased since day one of operations, Bruens pointed out that it is already reaching areas that he and Bruce could have barely imagined.
“In our first year commercially in 2018, we sold less than $1 Million – For 2026, we estimate annual sales will top $20 Million,” he said. “Demand, and therefore sales, have increase substantially every year.”
And that demand is likely to increase even more substantially in the next decade.
In a 2025 report by the U.S. Census Bureau, researchers estimated the number of U.S. seniors at more than 61 million and counting – outnumbering children in 11 states and nearly half of all the nation’s counties.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/older-adults-outnumber-children.html
And Bureau researchers are further projecting older adults to outnumber children by the year 2034 for the first time in U.S. history – meaning that the need for GTS’s solutions are probably going to increase each year for some time to come.
And if that happens, the question already facing Bruens, Bruce, and the entire GTS team is: How are we going to keep up with projected growth – and their costs – before it even starts?
“SALF has invested over $30 million to add new manufacturing technologies and systems to significantly increase production capacity,” Bruens said. “Around 10,000 people every year are waiting for an organ. We feel at GTS, it's our obligation to get that waiting list down to zero.”
