Breakthrough technology points to a new era for liver transplantation

OrganOx is delighted to announce the publication of a multinational clinical trial ('A randomized trial of normothermic preservation in liver transplantation') in Nature, the international journal of science.

In the first randomized study of its kind, transplanted livers were shown to function better if they had been preserved using the OrganOx metra device. This benefit was most pronounced in the most ‘marginal’ donor livers. Preservation using the metra device was also associated with increased use of available donor organs.

Funded by the European Commission, 220 livers were transplanted in this randomized controlled study across seven European transplant centres. Conventional organ preservation, in an ice box, (static cold storage (SCS)) was compared with storage using the metra device.

Whereas the traditional method of organ preservation requires cooling and storage in an ice box, normothermic machine perfusion with the OrganOx metra device maintains the liver at normal body temperature prior to transplantation and actively delivers oxygenated blood, medications and nutrients. This greatly reduces the tissue injury associated with transplantation and enables quality assessment by functional testing of the organ.

“We are in the business of saving lives by saving donor organs” said Craig Marshall, CEO of OrganOx Ltd. “By changing the way the donor livers are preserved and evaluated before they are transplanted, we expect to see more donor livers being transplanted. Our company is at the forefront of this exciting new technology, and we are also researching other applications for our platform to help address liver disease – which is predicted to become the largest cause of premature deaths by 2020.”

To read the study visit https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0047-9 or to read the article visit https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04816-8