Enhanced recovery of disqualified donor organs using image-guided machine perfusion

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In the United States alone, 76,000 lives are claimed by liver disease every year. Transplantation is currently the only established treatment, but there is a critical shortage of donor organs. More than 60% of candidates wait over a year to receive a transplant, the majority becoming too ill to tolerate the procedure. These numbers could be improved dramatically by expanding the available donor pool through the rescue of disqualified donor organs; conservatively estimated at 6,000 livers per year. We and others have shown experimentally that machine perfusion, an artificial body and blood supply for isolated donor organs, is a powerful methodology capable of administering treatment and significantly increasing viability.However, unlike tightly-controlled experimental livers, there is a large degre of variability that characterizes human donor organs, from a range of pre-existing comorbidities to the circumstances of death and the duration of warm and cold ischemia e