Technology that can keep heart, liver and kidney cells alive for HOURS after death –

The new technology can keep organ cells alive for hours after the rest of the body has died, in a breakthrough that experts hope will address the urgent need for more transplantable hearts, kidneys and livers.

Researchers at Yale University have developed “OrganEx”, an offshoot of the revolutionary “BrainEx” technology designed in 2019 by scientists from the New Haven, Connecticut school. live up to six hours after the death of the rest of the body.

This research was done on pigs, but the team hopes the experimental process will also have an effect on human organs. If so, it could significantly increase the supply of hearts, kidneys and livers available for transplant, even helping to prolong the lives of some people on the waiting list.

With more than 105,000 Americans waiting for organ transplants and 17 dying every day, the researchers hope these findings could help improve and prolong the lives of millions of people later on.

The study’s principal investigator told DailyMail.com that these findings “may one day significantly increase organ availability.”

Dr. By Robert Potre: A comment piece on the study in Nature on Wednesday, he told The New York Times that he hopes the impact of this process on the future of organ transplants will be “significant” and have an impact on global organ shortages. . . .

The research team, which published their findings Wednesday in Nature, induced cardiac arrest in anesthetized pigs to determine how body functions would respond to the compound.

An hour passed, and they used a machine-like device that pumped the heart and lungs to support the pigs’ organs while dispensing the substance during the surgery.

Six hours after death, key areas of cell function were still active in pig bodies, and some organ functions were restored even after death.

The neuroscience professor who led the work at Yale, Dr. “We were able to restore circulation in the body, which surprised us,” Nenad Sestan said in a statement.

They also discovered a reversal of electrical activity in the heart that allows it to continue pumping.

Sestan explained that when the heart stops, organs swell and blood vessels collapse, disrupting blood circulation in the body.

However, OrganEx-treated pigs did not show the same signs of collapse after treatment, but as a result their organs remained functional and most importantly transplantable.

Some motor functions of the pigs were also preserved, the animals still exhibited spontaneous head and neck muscle movements even after death.

These findings stem from a medical breakthrough at Yale in 2019. At the time, a research team was able to restore a pig’s brain function four hours after its death.

“The intact brain of a large mammal retains a previously underrated ability to restore circulation and certain molecular and cellular activities several hours after circulatory cessation,” Sestan said at the time. Said.

He then explained how the results of the BrainEx experiment were applied to develop OrganEx: “If we can restore some cellular functions in the dead brain, an organ known to be more susceptible to ischemia.” [inadequate blood supply]We hypothesized that something similar could be achieved in other transplantable vital organs.

The research team hopes their findings will greatly increase the number of organ transplants performed each year.

But they aren’t sure how much that is, as Sestan told DailyMail.com in an email that it would be difficult to quantify, but “technology may one day dramatically increase organ availability and overcome the logistical limitations of organ transplants. . “It can reduce.”

Porte is also confident. The Nature article states that many hospitals take a long time to collect organs, leaving many transplant recipients with poor quality organs.

This allows more organs to be harvested and possibly of higher quality.

When a person dies, there is a limited time for their organs to be harvested. Depending on the cause of death, some organs may be considered completely useless.

Maintaining and perhaps even repairing organs using this new technology will open many doors to transplantation.

The researchers also hope that OrganEx could be valuable before a person dies and extend the lifespan of a person’s organs currently in need of a transplant.

This could help prevent some of the 17-day organ death that awaits every day in America.

“There are numerous potential applications for this exciting new technology … however, we need to closely monitor all future studies, especially those involving brain perfusion,” he said. This was stated by Stephen Latham, director of the Yale Center for Interdisciplinary Bioethics.

There are also other questions that need to be answered. Sestan told DailyMail.com that his team does not yet know whether OrganEx-preserved organs are as durable, functional or safe for transplant as the organs currently used.

It also doesn’t know if it will affect the xenograft, which involves transplanting organs from one animal to another. This practice has been tried several times in recent years with varying degrees of success.