The Race Against Time: Supercooling Extends Liver Viability

Is it possible to transplant an organ from a donor on the East Coast to a patient on the West Coast without losing its viability? “Impossible with current technologies,” says Dr. Korkut Uygun from the Center for Engineering in Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. In the United States alone, one-fifth of patients who need a transplant will not receive one in time. Scientists in the field are combating this problem by developing methods to increase preservation time while reducing organ damage. In this episode, we discuss how Dr. Korkut Uygun and Dr. Reinier J. de Vries were able to extend human liver preservation from the current average of 12 hours to 27 hours. The scientist will help us elucidate two key techniques for organ preservation, namely supercooling and room temperature machine perfusion, and dive deeply into the challenges they faced in this endeavor and the impact of this technology for future patients in need of transplantation.