A medical paper published in the British journal Nature Biotechnology on the 31st said that a transplant patient who received a human liver preserved in vitro for three days by mechanical perfusion technology was still healthy one year after the operation. This technology may expand the number of transplantable livers, and is expected to arrange elective surgery for patients, thus saving more lives.
The gap between the global demand for liver transplantation and the number of available livers is widening. However, the current clinical practice requires that the storage time of donor liver on ice before transplantation should not exceed 12 hours. Doctors must "race against time", which also leads to a more limited number of donor liver that can be matched with transplant recipients.
The university hospital team in Zurich, Switzerland, has been working to extend the in vitro preservation time of the liver. In the latest report, researcher Pierre Alain Kevin and his colleagues used a machine to preserve a human liver in vitro for three days. The machine can operate a technology called "normal temperature perfusion in vitro", which can provide "blood substitute" for the liver in vitro at normal body temperature. The core is to imitate the key physiological body functions.
The liver was then transplanted into a patient with advanced liver cirrhosis and severe portal hypertension. The transplanted liver can work normally. After the blood flow from the blood vessels in the body recovers, there is only a small injury, and only the basic immunosuppressive regimen needs to be used within the first 6 weeks after transplantation.
The patient's quality of life recovered quickly, and there was no sign of liver injury, such as rejection or bile duct injury. The patient was still healthy one year after operation.
The researchers cautioned that further studies with longer follow-up time are still needed for more patients. However, the above results show that this kind of technology can not only expand the number of potential donor organs, but also open up the prospect of using drugs for donor organs before transplantation.