Brilio.net/en - Heart transplant has been the medical solution done for people who suffer from heart failure since 1967. It requires a heart donor from dead people whose heart still in good condition that is removed and transferred to the new owner to make a longer living for the recipient. Doctors had to cut away hearts from their brain-dead donors while the bodies still healthy to avoid ischemiathe damage in heart that left at body temperaturethat progressed as minutes passed by.
Transmedic, a company based in Andover, Massachusetts, USA, has recently developed a device that can make dead heart beating again for longer time after the brain of its owner had died and the soul had departed. Transplant surgeons already using this device to save people who need it.
The device is called heart in a box, which is a wheeled cart with a sterile chamber to place the heart, an oxygen supply, and tubing to clamp onto a donor heart, keeping it fed with blood and nutrients. This would extend the life of the heart to last outside the body. Plus, the device gives time for the doctors to recover hearts from the donor before transplant it to the new owner.
St. Vincents Hospital in New South Wales, Australia, described that they had to wait only for 2 minutes after the donors heart stopped before starting to remove it and before 20 minutes they could attached it to the Transmedic rig, which made the heart beating again with the supply of oxygenated blood and electrolytes.
While the traditional way for heart transplant would have to wait too long and the heart would be too damaged to use. Surgeons would use the hearts from brain-dead donors because they can be cooled down inside the body before it stopped, being removed and shipped at 4 C. The low temperatures cut the metabolic rate of the tissue around 90 percent so it has more time before attached to the new recipient. The heart in a box is keeping the organ warm and functioning in transplant process.
A donated heart beats outside the body viatechnologyreview.com
Cold is the old thing, and warm is the new thing, says Korkut Uygun, a transplant surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Warm is the way to go with metabolically active tissue.
There are several companies working on warm perfusion machines, such as Organ Assist in the Netherlands, OrganOx in Oxford, UK, and Organ Solution, a startup founded by Uygun to rescue livers from dead donors. He said Transmedics machine is too expensive and not yet automated enough. For example, the amount of oxygen reaching the heart isnt controlled automatically based on what the heart needs.
The device is worth USD 250,000 and is pending approval in the USA. It can expand the number of donated hearts by 15 to 30 percent, which help save lives of more people with heart failure. Surgeons in the UK and Australia have succeeded used it in at least 15 cases. The invention of this device would really help many people and make the heart transplant job easier for doctors.
Source: Technologyreview.com