New supercooling technique promises to boost the popularity of organ transplant surgeries

Jun 30, 2014 06:44 GMT  ·  By

A paper published in yesterday's issue of the journal Nature Medicine documents the development of a new supercooling technique that researchers say has the potential to boost the popularity of organ transplant surgery by keeping organs viable outside the body for several days in a row.

This new supercooling technique is the brainchild of Martin Yarmush and Korkut Uygun with the Center for Engineering in Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the United States, Medical Express informs.

As detailed in the journal Nature Medicine, the technique involves four steps, and it boils down to using both low temperatures and several chemical compounds to put an organ on stand-by and then store it for transplant.

So far, Martin Yarmush and Korkut Uygun have only tested their technique on livers belonging to laboratory rats. However, they say that they are quite pleased with their results, and hope to soon move on to larger animals.

Information shared with the public says that, as part of their experiments, the researchers first delivered a solution spiked with two compounds, i.e. 3-OMG (3-O-methyl-D-glucose) and PEG-35kD (polyethylene glycol), to the organs.

Of these two compounds, 3-OMG served to protect liver cells from damage likely to be caused by cold. PEG-35kD, on the other hand, was added to the solution to ensure that cell membranes would also keep their integrity when exposed to low temperatures.

After being treated with this solution, the rat organs were supercooled to precisely 21 degrees Fahrenheit (6.11 degrees Celsius), and then placed in storage. Some of the livers that the specialists experimented on were stored for 3 days, others for 4.

After being rewarmed and administered oxygen and nutrients, the organs were transplanted in laboratory rodents. The rats that received livers stored for 3 days all survived the procedure. The survival rate for rats that got 4 days old was one of 58%.

The researchers hope that, in the future, this technique will serve to up the amount of time that human organs stay viable outside the body. They say that, if it were possible to store human organs for more than 24 hours, as in this day and age, more patients could benefit from organ transplant surgeries.

This is because transcontinental and intercontinental transplantations would no longer be an issue. What's more, doctors would have more time to prepare a patient for surgery, and could even take their time to find perfect matches for the people in their care.

“The longer we are able to store donated organs, the better the chance the patient will find the best match possible, with both doctors and patients fully prepared for surgery. This is a critically important step in advancing the practice of organ storage for transplantation,” explains specialist Rosemarie Hunziker.