At a Mass General perfusion lab, a push to make more and more hearts viable for transplant Deborah Balthazar By Deborah Balthazar July 22, 2024

https://www.statnews.com/2024/07/22/mass-general-perfusion-lab-heart-transplants/?utm_campaign=morning_rounds&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--4Vcn7pHI9gTP9q7ZmL-KLPCRvwQoEw3CrulijWD1VN6xpXbvCNQlLOTA06dPYQbN3Dhqdw8oqV6B5TDQUdxuj0w6zOw&_hsmi=316676560&utm_content=316676560&utm_source=hs_email There are two holy grails in solid organ transplantation, says surgeon Dominic Emerson. First: Finding a way for transplanted organs to evade rejection. Second: Figuring out how to sustain organs outside of donors and recipients for longer periods of time, and how to rehabilitate them. At a lab in Boston, researchers are chilling hearts in pursuit of the latter goal. A Mass General Hospital team is working to improve a technique known as organ perfusion — taking an organ that has been kept cold for several hours and reviving it, maintaining the organ outside of the body in a box, and pumping it with blood to keep the tissues alive. Typically, hearts can’t be kept on ice for much more than four hours before the cold wrecks it. But after about a year and a half of work, the MGH team has used their new technique on 57 pig hearts and 11 human hearts that weren’t fit for transplantation. They were even able to reanimate a human heart for six hours, even though it had already been on ice for five to six.