ORGAN DONATION: A Human Liver Was Successfully Transplanted After Being Processed In A Machine.

Organ donation

A liver transplant is a surgical procedure that replaces a sick liver with a healthy liver from someone else. An entire liver or only a portion of one can be transplanted. In most circumstances, a healthy liver will come from a recently deceased organ donor. A healthy person may occasionally donate a portion of their liver.

 

Organ Donation

In May of 2021, Swiss researchers extracted a damaged liver from an organ donor, placed it in a revolutionary machine that replicated the biology of the human body and treated it for three days in that machine. They then put the newly repaired organ into a cancer patient who was in desperate need of a new liver but was on the excruciatingly long organ transplant waiting list.

Liver Transplantation

The team says that the organ recipient is still doing remarkably well one year after the groundbreaking treatment.

"The patient quickly restored a normal quality of life without any evidence of liver damage," the Liver4Life study team stated in a paper published in the journal Nature Biotechnology on Tuesday.

The 62-year-old transplant recipient said in a statement, "I am very grateful for the life-saving organ." "I had limited possibility of acquiring a liver from the waiting list in a fair amount of time due to my quickly developing tumor" The patient's identity was kept a secret.

Dr. Pierre-Alain Clavien, who was the surgeon, stands with the patient (right) as he was discharged from the hospital after the successful transplantation last year.

Only the first six weeks following surgery were given basic immunosuppressants.

Connecting the liver to the machine allows it to be treated with antibiotics or hormonal medicines, as well as conduct long laboratory or tissue testing without being rushed. Under normal conditions, this is not practicable because organs can only be preserved on ice and in commercially accessible perfusion devices for a maximum of 12 hours.

Even totally healthy donor livers can only be kept outside the human body for roughly 12 hours in normal cold storage or up to 24 hours in a perfusion system like the one developed by the scientists. Doctors must "assess, transport, and implant donor grafts for human transplantation" within that time frame, according to the paper, which limits not only the distance these organs can travel before reaching a recipient and the room for error during transport, but also effectively eliminates the possibility of repairing an organ prior to transplantation.

"Our therapy indicates that treating livers in a perfusion machine can alleviate the loss of functioning human organs and save lives," Prof Clavien stated.

"The interdisciplinary approach to overcoming complex health challenges inherent in this study is the future of medicine," said Mark Tibbitt, professor of macromolecular engineering at ETH Zurich.

"We will be able to employ new findings for treating patients even faster as a result of this."

The research was published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

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