New technique rehabs organs for more transplants
When Richard Pflug was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, marked by a scarring of lung tissue, he quickly learned that there was no cure and no way to stop its progression.
“You’d be better off with cancer,” Plug remembers the doctor saying. “We could do something about that.”
The now-69-year-old Steubenville man faced a future in which he would likely find it increasingly difficult to draw a breath.
So Pflug didn’t hesitate when, last year, doctors at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center offered him the chance to receive donated lungs through a new program that rehabilitates organs that once would have been discarded as too risky.
Pflug is among the 11 patients who have benefited from the program that uses “ex vivo perfusion” technology, through which damaged lungs are placed on a machine that keeps them alive at normal body temperature to allow doctors to better assess whether they are viable.
Those that pass the test are transplanted.
The program, which began two years ago, is now poised to open the technology to patients awaiting liver transplants as well.
Across Ohio, more than 500 people need a liver, and more than 50 need a singleor double-lung transplant. They are among 2,880 Ohioans waiting for organs.
Wexner’s first perfused-liver transplant will likely take place in the next two to three months as part of a clinical trial sponsored by Massachusetts-based TransMedics Inc., a company that manufactures perfusion machines, said Dr. Sylvester Black, a Wexner transplant surgeon and researcher.
He said the expansion of perfusion technology will mark a defining moment that pushes the field forward, similar to the advent of drugs that help prevent organ rejection.
“It allows you, for the first time, to consider repairing organs,” he said. “It will change, in the next 10 to 15 years, the face of how we do transplants the world over.”
The lung perfusion program began in August 2016, and since then, 11 perfused lungs are among the 92 total lungs that have been transplanted, said Dr. Bryan Whitson, a cardiothoracic surgeon who, with Black, co-directs Wexner’s perfusion lab.
“From an organ availability standpoint, it lets us go where we had not been willing to go,” Whitson said. “Organs that were on the cusp of being good enough quality for transplant, we can take those and try to resuscitate them.”
Last year, Lifeline of Ohio saw a 37 percent increase in transplants, and the new technology allows for more organs to be used than ever before, said Andrew Mullins, director of partner services for the nonprofit group, which facilitates organ donations across a region that includes central Ohio.
“It provides more hope for patients in need of a transplant that there’s a likelihood that, one day, you won’t have to wait for an organ to transplant,” Mullins said.