Transplant success: Liver survives out of body for days

Surgeons say they have successfully transplanted a donor liver kept warm and alive outside the body for three days, using a special machine.

The normothermic perfusion method gives the organ a continuous blood supply, which experts say is better than the traditional way of putting it on ice.

It might even be possible to stretch viability to 10 days, the Swiss team told the journal Nature Biotechnology.

The patient who received the warm liver is doing well a year on.

Experts hope the advance could help reduce the number of donor organs that have to be discarded, since preserving tissues and organs at low temperatures can cause substantial cell damage.

Extending how long a donor liver can be kept would allow more flexibility in the timing of the transplant operation too. Cooled livers only keep for up to 12 hours.

The machine can also deliver drugs or other nutrients, as well as blood, to make sure the organ is in the best condition ahead of the transplant.

The man who received the liver - which was plumbed into the perfusion machine for 68 hours - needed a new one because he had cancer.

His transplant operation was done four days after the donor organ was removed from its original owner - a 29-year-old woman who died in May 2021.

The man was able to go home from hospital 12 days after the surgery.

His doctors say more research - with more patients and longer observation periods - is still needed, but the results so far look very promising.

"We think that this first transplantation success...can open new horizons in the treatment of many liver disorders," they told Nature Biotechnology journal.

Some of the UK's seven liver transplant units have also started using the same type of technology, and experts at Oxford University plan to assess the outcomes as part of a trial called the PLUS study.