Organ transplantation saves thousands of lives, but it is a procedure that is not without its problems. The synthesis of artificial organs from stem cells of the patients themselves is a promising alternative, and quite possibly in the future it could replace transplantation. But we are talking about a technique that is still very far away and, meanwhile, the scientific community continues to work to overcome the drawbacks of this technique.
The possibility of rejection by the receiver is one of the main obstacles to overcome, but there are other problems. One of them is the preservation of the organ once it has been extracted from the donor for long enough to take it to the hospital where the surgical intervention is performed and, in addition, prepare the recipient for the operation.
A study that has just been published in the journal Nature Biotechnology describes the procedure by which six human livers have been preserved outside the body for a full week. Scientists, from the University Hospital of Zurich and the University of Zurich (Switzerland), built a machine that has not only managed to keep the organs alive for a week, but has also repaired their damage.
A complex perfusion system
The technology consists of a perfusion system that allows blood and other fluids to be introduced intravenously, so that bodily functions can be mimicked. The team carried out their tests with ten human livers considered ‘of low quality’ and that had been rejected for transplantation by all the centers in Europe and, as we have mentioned, managed to repair and keep six of them alive for a whole week.
“The success of this perfusion system, developed over a period of four years by a group of surgeons, biologists and engineers, paves the way for many new applications in transplants and anticancer drugs that can help patients,” he explained Pierre -Alain Clavien, Chairman of the Department of Surgery and Transplantation at the University Hospital of Zurich. When the project started in 2015, the livers could only be kept alive in the machine for twelve hours. Now, the success in the perfusion process for seven days allows a wide range of strategies: repair of pre-existing lesions, cleaning of fat deposits in the liver or even partial regeneration of the organ.
This is not the only work that advances in this line of research. In September 2019, a team of scientists from Harvard Medical School (USA) and the University of Amsterdam published an article in the journal Nature Biotechnology in which they also described a technique to keep a liver alive for up to 27 hours thanks to a cryopreservation process.
Currently, livers used for transplants are stored for a maximum of twelve hours, since that is the time in which the organ can be kept cold (at 4 ° C) without losing its viability. The development of new techniques and machines such as those described in these investigations offers a promising way to facilitate the processes and also to obtain more livers available for transplantation, thanks to the ability to repair the damage produced in these organs.
