WORLD-FIRST TRANSPLANT OF DEAD HEARTS
Australian doctors have successfully brought three dead hearts back to life and transplanted them into patients in a world-first operation.
The doctors at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney used a preservation solution developed with the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute to transplant the organs into 57-year-old Michelle Gribilas, 44-year-old Jan Damen and a third patient still in recovery.
One of the hearts had stopped beating for 20 minutes before it was brought back to life, placed on a machine and injected with the preservation solution.
The hospital believes 30 percent more lives will be saved thanks to the solution, which reduces the amount of damage to the heart and makes it more resilient to transplantation. Before these operations, heart surgeons have only been able to use donor hearts from 100 percent brain-dead patients, but now the donor pool will be expanded significantly.
The solution, which took 12 years to develop, also improves the function of the hearts donated after circulatory death (DCD) when they are restarted. Ms. Gribilas, who is retired and lives in Campsie in southwest Sydney, said she is a ‘different person altogether’ after receiving her transplant.
‘Now I feel wonderful. I walk three kilometres a day’ she said. Previously, surgeons were only able to use hearts from donor patients who were 100 per cent brain dead.
‘North America and Europe are very envious that we were able to get on and do this,’ Dr. Jansz told Daily Mail Australia. Doctors at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney used a heart-resuscitation console and preservation solution developed in Australia to transplant dead hearts into patients These patients’ hearts are kept alive and beating by life support machines and are able to be removed from the donor patient and placed straight into a Transmedics machine which keeps the heart pumping, with minimal damage to the organ.
But the new solution allows transplants using hearts from 90-95 percent brain dead patients, which were previously thought to be too damaged to use. When a 90-95 percent brain-dead patient’s life support is switched off, the heart gradually stops beating over a period of about 20 minutes.
Under Australian law, surgeons must wait until there has been no heartbeat for five minutes before the organ can be removed.
The lack of oxygen during this time causes significant damage to the heart and until now has meant those hearts could not be used for transplants. But when the new solution is injected into the heart its cells start to regenerate. One of the surgeons who performed the operations, Dr. Paul Jansz, said the technology would have implications for transplant units around the world. ‘It literally is a world first, it means a lot for the transplant world.’
When a 90-95 percent braindead patient’s life support is switched off, the heart gradually stops beating over a period of about 20 minutes