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Beating Heart Transplants

The current, four decades old, organ transportation system uses an off-the-shelf cooler filled with ice to preserve the heart. With this method, transplantation should occur within 4 to 6 hours of harvesting. The longer the heart is on ice, the greater the chances of death or heart disease after the transplant.

TransMedics is going to revolutionize the organ transplant transportation methodology.

Inside the transportation cart, warm, oxygenated, nutrient-rich blood is pumped through a revived, beating heart. In this way the heart can tolerate longer intervals between harvesting and implantation.

One of the early “beating heart” transplants, in the U.S., occurred recently at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. Surgeons re-stopped the donor heart before hooking it up. The heart restarted on its own when the recipient’s blood, via a heart-lung machine, started flowing through it.

This system should increase the number of transplants as the number of possible recipients and the number of possible donors are increased due to the increased transportation range. Fewer donated organs will go without recipients.

The units reportedly cost around $200,000, but with reuse, the cost per patient should be much lower.

H/T: Yahoo! News.

-David Drumm (Nal)

24 thoughts on “Beating Heart Transplants”

  1. Mrs. Spindell,

    It is a pleasure to see you here again. I hope that Mike is doing well and he is lucky to have you around. I hope to see you both on here as regulars real soon…

  5. How do I share this post on Facebook. I have many connection on fb with people in the transplant community. I’d like to share it via this site but I don’t see a share link for fb. Thx

  6. Livers and kidneys have a longer shelf life so to speak. Lungs have the shortest. Perhaps one day stem cells will replace the need for many xplants that are performed at this time.

  8. What they mean by death is brain death not heart or organ death.

    Agreed that this is a wonderful new system. However, the problem with organ transplant is that there are not enough donors. Signing the back of your driver’s license is not enough. You have to make your wishes clear to your family.
    There is a big misconception about organ donation and transplantation on many fronts. I could write a book. Right now though, my guy is in the hospital since his white blood count is far too low due to anti rejection meds. It is an injectable medication that could be administered easily at home, that is if it didn’t cost $1,000 / week, and that is just the co payment.
    Interestingly after doing some research I discovered that this same medication is covered in full if it is administered in the hospital. Hows that for craziness. So instead of simply paying for the meds, they now have to pay for his hospital stay along with this new med and all the others, and he, after finally starting to get back to his life is stuck in the hospital once again.

  9. Lorraine,

    The heart is beating while inside the transport machine.

    It’s stopped (if required) to remove it. It’s restarted once hooked up inside the machine. It’s stopped just before implantation. It’s restarted after the transplant.

  10. The author of this article, may have gotten a bit confused with the medical/surgical facts? He stated: “surgeons re-stopped the donor heart before hooking it up.” The heart wouldn’t have been ‘beating” in the first place!

    A heart transplant occurs when the donor dies, the heart is removed, it’s not beating, and then it’s transplanted into a recipient. When all the arteries and veins are connected, then they “re-start” the heart; they don’t transplant hearts that are beating, stop them, then, re-start them again!

  12. My father-in-law just received a heart transplant. Of course, being here in the city of Chicago, there are plenty of opportunities for donors to no longer say “but I’m using it!!!” (Monty Python reference.) We haven’t been formally told about the donor, but the papers ran a story about a fatal motorcycle crash with very similar timing to the hospital calling and saying “we think we may have a heart, come on in.”

    I assume that this gizmo would basically mean that any donor heart could be transported to anywhere else in the country (US, possibly Canada), which would make the donor/recipient pool national.

    Thinking about rcambell’s comments: It’s the snazzy, surgical advances that get lots of attention, but the advances in the “background” of health have made the biggest differences in our lives. Antibiotics and vaccinations have had a massive effect on lifespans and quality of life. But it’s public health that has made the biggest difference in the last century – from food safety to good sewer systems and water treatment, we can expect to live decades longer than our great-great-great-grandparents thanks to these “behind the scenes” advances.

  15. This was just too good to not share. I was trying to find the most appropriate thread and this seemed to be the most technology related.

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ykbk9hBoxk&fs=1&hl=en_US]

  16. A nice story about your father, rcampbell..

    And Dredd, I’m humming Springsteen now… 🙂

  17. My father was born in 1919, he’s 91. A few years ago my daughter asked him to jot down a list of some of the things he found most ground breaking or transformative or monumental during his lifetime which covered much of the 20th century. He, of course, listed things like the Depression, WWII, early radio evolving to TV, computers, etc. But the things he said most fascinated him were the advanments in medicine. When he reads stories like the one above he’ll say, “Gotta add that one to the list.” He’ll sometimes say that had this or that treatment been available, someone he knew that had died might have lived a longer or better life. Thanks for the information, Nal. I’ll be sure to pass this one on to him.

  18. “Everybody’s got a hungry heart … you lay down your money and you play your part …” (Springsteen)

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