‘Incredible’: How Yale scientists restored pig organs an hour after death

After inserting a solution called OrganEx into the veins of pigs that had been dead for an hour, scientists were able to revive the cells in the pigs’ organs, according to a study published in Nature. This offers a potential tool to increase the number of organs available for transplant and raises questions about the definition of death.

Study details

The study built on an earlier study conducted by researchers from Yale University in which a device called the BrainEx pumped synthetic blood into 32 brains taken from pigs that had been dead for hours. The researchers observed several signs that the brain was regaining function after being connected to BrainEx and receiving the solution.

For the new study, the Yale researchers inserted the OrganEx solution — which contains nutrients, anti-inflammatory drugs, drugs to prevent cell death, nerve blockers and artificial hemoglobin mixed with each animal’s blood — into the veins of pigs that had been anesthetized were and killed an hour before.

The researchers found that the pigs given OrganEx had their hearts start beating and cells in a number of organs – including the heart, liver, kidneys and brain – started to function again. They also found that the pigs did not stiffen like a typical dead pig would.

By comparison, other pigs that had also been dead for an hour and were treated with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) – a machine used to pump blood out of the body, oxygenate it and then put it back into the body – became stiff, yours Organs swelled and became damaged, and their blood vessels collapsed.

The potential for organ transplants, treatments

The study’s authors said they were shocked by OrganEx’s ability to revive cells in dead pig organs.

“We didn’t know what to expect,” said David Andrijevic, a neuroscientist at Yale and author of the study. “Everything we have restored has been incredible for us.”

The authors said one goal of OrganEx is to ultimately use it to increase the supply of human organs available for transplant.

According to Robert Porte, a transplant surgeon at the University of Groningen In the Netherlands, most countries have a five-minute “no-touch” policy after a patient’s ventilator is turned off before transplant surgeons come to harvest organs. “However, before you rush into the operating room, it takes more minutes,” and sometimes organs can be damaged to the point where they’re unusable, he said.

For this reason, between 50% and 60% of patients who die off life support and whose families request organ donation cannot be donors New York Times reports.

If OrganEx is able to revive those organs, the effect would be “huge,” Porte said, and the number of organs available for transplantation would increase significantly.

“You could take an organ from a deceased donor and hook it up to the perfusion technology and then maybe transport it over long distances over a long period of time to get it to a recipient who needs it,” said Stephen Latham, director of the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and co-author of the study.

Alexandra Glazier, President of New England Donor Servicessaid the OrganEx system could be “a game changer in addressing organ shortages.”

However, Latham warned that this research is still in the very early stages.

“We can’t say that this study showed that any of this pig’s organs … were ready to be transplanted into other animals, we don’t know that they’re all working, what we’re seeing is the cellular and metabolic levels,” he said . “And we’re still a long way from being able to say, ‘Oh my God, we didn’t just bring this pig back to life, we brought every single organ back to life.’ We can’t say that yet. It’s much too early.”

Porte added that OrganEx could also be used to treat heart attack and stroke patients. “One could imagine that the OrganEx system (or components of it) could be used to treat such people in an emergency,” he said. “However, it should be noted that more research is needed first to confirm the safety of the system components in specific clinical situations.”

However, Latham warned that the use of OrganEx is also “pretty distant”.

“This idea of ​​merging [a] someone who’s had an ischemic injury, you know, someone who’s drowned or had a heart attack, I think that’s pretty far off,” he said.

The ethical questions

Some experts also said the study raises ethical questions about the definition of death.

Nita Farahany, law professor at the Duke University which examines the ethical, legal and social implications of new technologies, said the study was “incredible, overwhelming”.

“We assume that death is a thing, it’s a state of being,” she said. “Are there forms of death that are reversible? Or not?”

Brendan Parent, attorney, ethicist and director of transplant ethics and policy research New York University‘s Grossman School of Medicinesaid the study raises “tough questions about life and death.”

“By the accepted medical and legal definition of death, these pigs were dead,” he said. But, he added, “a crucial question is: what function and what kind of function would change things?”

Parent also said OrganEx creates an ethical dilemma between balancing how useful the technology can be in increasing the supply of transplantable organs and how it can be used by physicians in near-death patients.

“We have an ethical obligation to prioritize its development to save lives before considering how it can benefit organ transplantation,” he said. (Kolata, New York Times, 8/3; Mark, Wall Street Journal, 8/3; Hunt, CNN, 8/3)