This platform provides cross-circulation of blood from a living host to maintain homeostasis of organs for extended preservation and injury repair prior to transplantation.
The demand for transplantable organs increases every year, and supply is further limited by the short time period for which donor organs remain viable using current support systems. As such, techniques for extending extracorporeal organ lifetime are critically needed. Conventional methods of extracorporeal organ support rely on circulation of perfusion fluids in closed systems, which lack metabolic clearance and therefore the ability to maintain physiologic homeostasis, resulting in the accumulation of toxic metabolites and waste products that have deleterious effects on organ function and viability. This problem limits the extended support time to 6-12 hours, which is still prohibitively short for medical intervention (e.g., to treat infections or improve organ function by clearing inflammation) in an extracorporeal setting. Notably, current support methods do not allow repair of organ injury prior to transplant.
This technology allows prolonged extracorporeal support of an organ, tissue, or bioengineered graft by cross-circulation via connection of a host (e.g., animal or organ transplant recipient). In lieu of constantly re-circulating the same fluid, this system utilizes cross-circulation of host blood to ensure the maintenance of homeostasis outside the body, increasing the time of organ viability from hours to days and potentially weeks. The extended duration of extracorporeal support will allow for intervention and recovery of otherwise unusable donor organs, thereby significantly expanding the pool of transplantable donor organs as well as providing a means for modifying the donor organ for improved long-term outcomes. This technology has been validated in a swine model for human and swine lungs and livers.
The technology was covered by the:
The following images are of human donor lungs recovered over 24 hours of cross-circulation, taken at 0 hours, 12 hours, and 24 hours:
 |
 |
 |
Ex vivo maintenance of extracorporeal donor organs
Recovery of sub-optimal donor organs
Conditioning prior to organ transplant
Xenotransplantation studies
Disease modeling
Drug testing
Prolonged organ preservation times
Increased pool of organs for transplant
Maintenance of organ function and normal physiology
Medical intervention on donor organ
Enhanced patient outlook for recipients of donated organs
Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, Ph.D.
IR CU16207, CU18416, CU19009, CU19020, CU19051, CU19143
Licensing Contact: Beth Kauderer