This machine can bring a human heart back from the dead.
Created by Massachusetts-based medical device startup TransMedics, the $250,000 (£165,000) Organ Care System puts a donated heart into conditions similar to those inside a person's chest, preserving it at near-body-temperature for up to ten hours. Tubes connected to its chambers cycle through a one-litre supply of the donor's blood and nutrients, and a canister in the machine provides the oxygen. "Half the time, once we begin perfusing the organ, it starts beating spontaneously," explains TransMedics vice-president of global marketing Neal Beswick. "Otherwise, we use a defibrillation pulse to give it a kick-start."
This system -- already in use throughout Europe and Australia, with clinical trials ongoing in the US -- has made it possible to transplant hearts obtained from cardiac death (DCD) donors, whose circulation stops before the heart is removed.
Cold storage, the most common organ-preservation method, only allows for heart transplants from brain-dead, but beating-heart, donors.
Blood and Transplant Authority suggests a 25 to 30 per cent increase in heart transplant availability by using DCD hearts," says Stephen Large, lead surgeon on the first European DCD heart transplant performed at Papworth Hospital, Cambridge, in March.
Two thirds of donated hearts are currently discarded by doctors who are unsure of their functionality. "Here, there is a system where you can watch the heart beating," Beswick says. "You can discover whether it's transplantable."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
