Jacob Niall Schroder is the Director of the Heart Transplantation Program at Duke University. He recently tweeted a series of tweets where he explained the many benefits of warm perfusion. For those of you who do not know, warm perfusion is a technique that is used during transplantation. It basically keeps the donor heart pumping while it is being preserved for surgery.
Warm perfusion can help you avoid the adverse effects of organ degradation that take place when you rely on the conventional techniques of keeping organs in a cooling box. Niall Schroder detailed the warm perfusion procedure in a tweet on August 3. He said that it was ‘hard to argue’ with the results of this technique.
Niall Schroder points out that the particular heart would have been rejected in most of the US Centers as it had been outside of a body past a certain time threshold. For this particular case; it was seventy-five minutes. Warm perfusion by Transmedics has, however, shown to allow for successful transplantation to take place even with organs that have been out of the body for ten hours.
Transmedics’ OCS is basically a portable gadget that can keep the donor organs in a state that is similar to the state that they would have been in a human body. The technology is utilized for imitating the human body conditions by making sure that the heart continues pumping and remains at a warm temperature.
The company has said that a significant amount of clinical evidence has shown that this approach allows for improved results as opposed to the current ways of cooling organs. Niall Schroder has also tweeted that the patient, whose case was outlined, has been doing wall and wanted his story to be shared so that the effectiveness of this technique could be highlighted. The primary benefit, as stated by Niall Schroder is that this technique can ‘significantly expand the donor pool’ by reducing the number of rejected and unused donor hearts.
