Will cold machine perfusion help revolutionize organ transplant?
Organ Recovery Systems founder and CEO David Kravitz has more than a professional interest in organ transplantation. In the 1990s while the entrepreneur was running a company under contract with the U.S. military to improve battlefield trauma care, his own father ended up needing a heart transplant.
At the time Kravitz had no experience with organ transplantation, so he was astonished to learn that the heart that would save his father’s life could only come from within a few hours’ distance and would “show up in a beer cooler,” he said. “I just couldn’t quite believe it, and the doctors were telling me that was the state-of-the-art.”
“The original vision was…keeping the organ alive and sustained so it could travel longer and be healthier.”
Kravitz was sure there had to be a better way to protect and preserve an organ in transit. For years his efforts had been focused on trying to use interventional hypothermia — deliberately lowering a patient’s body temperature — to protect the brain from neurological complications following battlefield trauma. Drawing on this work, he conceived an interventional hypothermia-inspired design for a mechanized organ transporter. “The original vision was to enhance portability and preservation, keeping the organ alive and sustained so it could travel longer and be healthier,” he said. Read more at UNOS.org.
Read about warm (“normothermic) machine perfusion technology.
Read about companies at the forefront of normothermic machine perfusion.
carolinekettlewell 