Donated liver stored for three days before successful transplant

A TRANSPLANT patient who received a damaged liver that had been repaired and preserved for three days outside the body is still healthy after one year, scientists have confirmed.

The breakthrough raises hope of saving the lives of hundreds of people who die every year in Britain waiting for a transplant because of a shortage of donors.

Currently livers intended for transplant typically survive for only about eight to 10 hours on ice, or 24 hours if hooked up to a special perfusion device, severely limiting how far they can be transported.

However, the University of Zurich in Switzerland has shown that not only can they keep the organs alive far longer, but their system also repairs damage in livers that would normally have been rejected. They believe that around 60 per cent of diseased or injured livers could now be used.

The patient who received a transplant in May last year, rapidly recovered a normal quality of life without any signs of liver damage. The man, who chose to remain anonymous, had endstage liver disease and liver cancer, but was way down on the transplant list because his prognosis was so poor.

The liver was kept alive using a machine that performs a technique known as ex-situ normothermic perfusion, which essentially tricks the organ into thinking it is still in the body by mimicking internal fluids and temperature. The team believes the machine may put the organ into a resting state allowing it to regenerate, before it wakes back up when implanted into the body.

The scientists said that the liver operated in ways they had only seen previously in “close to perfect” organs from young healthy donors where the organ had been transplanted immediately.

A separate study found that everyone’s liver is a little under three years old, answering a long-standing question about how fast the organ regenerates. Researchers at Dresden University of Technology in Germany, analysed the livers of multiple individuals who died at ages between 20 and 84 years old. They found the liver cells of all subjects were more or less the same age.