An end of one life can lead to the salvation of several, and by this I mean organ donation and transplantation. Removing the organ is just one of the first links in an extraordinarily complex chain of events that must unfold under the right conditions. In an attempt to improve the odds, the company Transmedics developed the Organ Care System, a special chamber that keeps a heart alive with blood and oxygen.
When a transplant is needed, doctors not only struggle with the wait for a donor, fatigue, and technical details, but also with time. In simple terms, the clock is the enemy, and if they can gain an extra minute in any way, they will take it. Humans are more fragile creatures than we appear. Our body must maintain a complex equilibrium dependent on internal and external factors, and when we reach the end, everything that “composes” us, so to speak, begins to deteriorate rapidly. That’s why doctors must move so fast. In the case of heart transplants, they always seek donors who are brain-dead, but if doctors judge that the heart has suffered too much damage, the transplant becomes unviable.
(Warning: The video shows an exposed heart and significant amounts of blood. If there are small children or someone impressionable watching, you might want to take the necessary precautions.)
https://www.youtube.com/embed/j9_7jjUoMpYA 180-Degree Turn in Organ Preservation
Fortunately, medicine has a new resource to fight back. Transmedics has developed the Organ Care System platform, which can essentially revive and keep alive a recently extracted organ for longer periods. The Organ Care System represents a 180-degree turn in organ preservation. The “traditional” method for properly handling a heart requires cooling it inside the body, stopping it, extracting it, and transporting it at an average temperature of 4 degrees Celsius. Instead, with this system, the organ stays warm and functioning while receiving blood, nutrients, and oxygen.
More Donors, Bigger Questions
Beyond gaining time and preserving organs better, what the Organ Care System allows is increasing the number of available donors. By being able to transplant hearts from people with “circulatory death”, the number expands by between 15 and 30 percent. Of course, this triggers a whole series of ethical debates. Basically, the most important question is this: How do you establish that the donor’s situation was irreversible when the organ’s circulatory function is restored, and moreover in another body? Another aspect to evaluate is cost: Each platform costs 250 thousand dollars. Even so, its intervention and subsequent success in more than fifteen cases only justify the investment.
