Randall (Randy) Kendrick ‘86 has always been a bold thinker, willing to invest in the Big Idea, whether that means launching his first real estate business the same day he graduated from USC Marshall School of Business or pioneering ways to balance development with environmental stewardship on a megasite in central Texas.
So Kendrick, inspired by his mentor and former Marshall School professor Rocky Tarantello, was ready to sign on when he learned about pediatric cardiac surgeon John David Cleveland, MD , and his groundbreaking research aimed at giving babies with congenital heart disease a better chance to live longer.
Kendrick’s $3 million gift to Keck Medicine of USC has established the Kelly Tarantello Chair in Pediatric Cardiac Surgery. Its inaugural holder is another bold thinker: John David Cleveland, MD, Chief of the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) and Assistant Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics at the Keck School
of Medicine.
The chair is named in honor of Tarantello’s daughter Kelly, who was born with congenital heart disease. It is the former Marshall School professor—who led a popular real estate development program for students—that Kendrick credits with giving him the foundation for his success today.
Kendrick’s gift will help advance Cleveland’s groundbreaking preclinical research into a lifesaving alternative for critically ill babies—many of whom die while waiting for a heart transplant due to a severe shortage of donor organs.
For the first time, Cleveland and his team at CHLA have demonstrated in laboratory studies that the use of genetically engineered pig hearts may work as a potential bridge to heart transplant or even a more lasting answer. “I am excited about this gift to honor Rocky, Kelly and Dr. Cleveland. If we save only one child it is more than worth it,” said Kendrick, founder, president, and CEO of Xebec, a national logistics real estate platform.
This is not the first gift that the visionary entrepreneur has made to his alma mater, but it is his first to medical science at USC.
In 2021, he made a transformational $20 million naming gift to USC Marshall to fund the Randall R. Kendrick Global Supply Chain Institute. A Trojan track-and-field alumnus, Kendrick also supported the renovation of the Alyson Felix Field, which was completed in 2021, and was a cornerstone donor for the Bloom Football Performance Center at USC, which opened August, 2026.
His current passion project is transforming a 33,000-acre property northeast of Austin, known as Sandow Lakes. Once the site of the largest aluminum smelter on earth, under Kendrick’s leadership the property is taking shape as a model of sustainability and invention. Its first phase: a 50 million-square-foot, master-planned industrial park and a cutting-edge 1,200 MW combined cycle natural gas power plant.
“With this endowment of a new chair in pediatric cardiothoracic surgery, Randy Kendrick has once again exemplified our highest Trojan values,” said USC President Beong-Soo Kim. “He is a true business innovator, and he has repeatedly translated that success into meaningful and generous action on behalf of others. This gift, which will save the lives and improve the health of untold numbers of children, is a spectacular example of that.”
Cleveland’s CHLA team is at a critical point in their research, with cardiac xenotransplantation moving closer to clinical reality. “We still have more to learn in the lab, but with Mr. Kendrick’s generosity, we have more resources to advance these potentially life-saving investigations.”
Kelly Tarantello was born with single-ventricle heart disease and underwent a series of surgeries as a newborn and toddler to “reconnect” her heart’s plumbing to enable it to rely on one ventricle. Over the years she had other procedures, including a heart and liver transplant at age 29 at another Los Angeles facility. She died at age 32.
“My daughter would be gratified to know that her name will be associated with discoveries in pediatric cardiac surgery,” said Tarantello, head of Tarantello & Associates in New York. “My years at USC were a memorable time, including the start of my friendship with Randy Kendrick, and I appreciate his furthering this important cause.”
Pediatric heart transplant volumes in the U.S. have stayed static for more than a decade. There are about 400 to 500 such surgeries each year, yet the need is much higher.
Ventricular assist devices (VADs), mechanical pumps that boost the heart’s circulation of blood to the body, can support some patients during their wait for a heart transplant. However, infants with single-ventricle heart disease need other options.
Less than a third of such babies survive even three months on a VAD, due to high rates of strokes, bleeding, and infections. As a result, few survive long enough to get a new heart.
Xenotransplants often utilize pig organs because the organ size and anatomy closely match humans and scientists can genetically modify the organs to make them more immunologically compatible.
As a result, pig hearts may support babies until suitable human hearts can be found, even allowing them to go home during the waiting period for a human heart. This is in drastic opposition to current standards of care where they live for months to over a year connected to VADs in the hospital.
“Our experts at CHLA’s Heart Institute are dedicated to refining and developing new surgical techniques, in partnership with the latest techniques in genetics and immunology,” said Vaughn Starnes, MD, Chair of Surgery at USC. “Having a donor like Randy Kendrick on our team can change the future for more children.”
In addition to exploring the viability of using pig hearts in transplants, Cleveland’s CHLA team is testing an investigational medication designed to retrain the immune system to better accept a foreign organ as “self.”
In a landmark study, Cleveland and his team recently showed that a genetically engineered pig heart can function for two years in an animal model—far beyond the previous record of nine months. He presented the results in April 2026 to the International Society for Heart & Lung Transplantation, where the study was called the strongest evidence yet that a cardiac xenograft can grow, adapt, and maintain healthy function over an extended period.
If such findings hold true when the research moves to human clinical trials, cardiac xenotransplantation “could offer children not only a reliable bridge to transplant,” said Cleveland, “but also the possibility of life-altering destination therapy.”