Invention: Sustaining transplant organs
Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are waiting for life-saving donor organs. Many organs fail to reach their recipients because technology limits preservation time outside the body. A major improvement, the Organ Care System (OCS) developed by US heart surgeon Waleed Hassanein, preserves organ function for longer periods and ensures higher transplant success rates.
Deployed in clinics since 2007, OCS replaces the decades-old
technique known as "cold ischemia". Cold ischemia relies on flushing
the freshly retrieved donor organ with a cool, sterilised solution to remove
all blood before packing it in ice. The process forestalls the death of the
organ by a few hours. Hassanein's system preserves the organ outside the human
body by maintaining its vital functions.
Hassanein began working on his breakthrough as a resident physician at Georgetown University in the early 1990s. Frustrated by losing potentially life-saving donor organs during cold storage, he experimented with keeping them in a warm environment, surrounded by nutrient-rich blood. His findings became the foundation for OCS, which not only sustains the life of organs without loss of function, but also allows clinicians to inspect organs for damage during storage and even to treat infections outside the body. Originally developed for storing human hearts, OCS is now also available for lungs and livers and has already been used in over 800 successful transplants worldwide.
Societal benefit
The invention holds the potential to improve outlooks significantly for patients in need of donor organs. According to the United Network for Organ Sharing, a person is added to the waiting list for donor organs every 10 minutes in the US alone, and 22 people die each day while waiting for a transplant. In EU countries - along with Iceland, Norway and Turkey - around 86 000 patients were on organ waiting lists in 2013. Given the limitations of cold storage, experts estimate that globally, 60% to 65% of donor hearts cannot be used for transplant operations.
OCS expands the pool of available organs in three ways. First, it prolonges the lifespan of an organ en route to a recipient. While the time limit for cold-stored hearts is four hours, hearts stored in OCS have been transplanted successfully after 11 hours. Second, OCS allows doctors to monitor and assess the health of the donor organ outside the body, which is impossible with cold ischemia. And third, OCS can obtain donor organs from non-beating heart patients, which expands the pool by 25% in the UK.
Economic benefit
Widespread adoption of OCS could create an end-to-end live organ storage network between donors, clinics and recipients. Currently, the OCS technology platform - consisting of the OCS Lung, OCS Heart and OCS Liver systems - is CE-marked in the EU and approved in Australia and Canada, while FDA approval is pending in the US. As a first step, the UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) officially endorsed the OCS Heart system for clinical use in 2016.
In order to market his patented inventions, Hassanein founded Massachusetts-based start-up company TransMedics in 1998. So far, the company has received some EUR 280 million in venture capital and private equity and employs 70 people.
Replacing the decades-old standard of cold storage, Hassanein's organ-preserving systems have the potential to reinvigorate the organ preservation solutions market. Currently valued at EUR 56.7 million by analysts Transparency Market Research, the market is expected to triple in size over the next years, exceeding EUR 189 million by 2019.
