Cooled livers can usually only stay alive 12 hours after being removed from a human body. However, a team of Zurich scientists have been able to successfully transplant a liver that lived three days inside a machine.
The machine allowed scientists to stretch the viability of the organ for three days and it may even be able to expand it for as long as 10 days, the Swiss team told the journal Nature Biotechnology. The feat involved a collaboration between the University Hospital Zurich (UHZ), ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich.
“Our therapy shows that by treating livers in the perfusion machine, it is possible to alleviate the lack of functioning human organs and save lives,” said Professor Pierre-Alain Clavien from the UHZ.
The team was able to transform a liver that was originally considered too poor-quality to be transplanted into a quality organ. To do this, the scientists optimised liver metabolism through multi-day perfusion. Usually, these processes...