As we stated in our most recent blog, transplantation is often the last life-preserving resort in the case of end state lung disease. Thus it was for a patient in Leuven, Belgium last Fall. The patient also needed a liver transplant, and this posed a problem for the multidisciplinary transplant team at University Hospitals Leuven.
In order to have time to complete the liver transplant, the doctors needed to preserve the donor longs longer than ever before. Due to a new technique, they “successfully preserved a set of donor lungs for over eleven hours with the help of a machine, the longest period ever reported.”
Dr. Dirk Van Raemdonck, of the Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, Campus Gasthuisberg, stated “Normally, the lung transplant is carried out before the liver transplant. A donor lung typically can only be preserved outside the body for a maximum of ten hours. And a lung transplant can only be successful if the liver is still working properly. That is why we needed to transplant the liver before the lungs for this patient.”
Normally, donor lungs are packed in ice, but in this instance, they were preserved using a machine, OCS LUNG™.
In the words of its creators,”The OCS™ LUNG is a portable perfusion, ventilation, and monitoring system that maintains the organ in a near physiologic state.
The system
enables surgeons to perfuse and ventilate the organ between the donor and recipient sites.”
If you are curious, we suggest you click to this reliable source to learn more and take a look at this amazing piece of technology.
The cutting edge technology of the OCS LUNG™ machine maintained the donor lungs at room temperature, and constantly provided them with flushing and oxygen. Dr. Van Raemdonck stated, “The machine enabled us to keep the lungs outside the body for more than eleven hours with no negative effects, the longest period ever reported — a world first.”
Another function of the machine to continually analyze the quality of the lung. It can even improve lung function before the transplant.
This development was preceded by similar machine for kidneys. Studies in that parallel transplantation showed that older donor kidneys thus preserved better than those preserved using the traditional ice technique.
At this time, this radical new technique is still very new, and only used in special cases. In the case above, all the costs for this transplantation were covered entirely by University Hospitals Leuven and the maker of the machine,Transmedics.
Here is the best news of all: We are happy to report that the patient in our opening story left the hospital and remains in good health. Since then other major hospitals, such as UPMC Presbyterian and UCLAhave reported excellent results using this new technique and the OCS LUNG™ machine. We suggest you visit the sites of their stories to find more technical information.
Here in Olando, we applaud the results of the current lung researchers all over the globe. We are proud to bring you late breaking medical and surgical news, and we believe that the new technological, phramaceutical, and bioengineering advances being made in the respiratory field are accelerating at an amazing pace. This fact gives some of our patients one thing that can not be transplanted by surgery: hope.