When it comes to body transplants, it’s pretty much a necessity that the donor is alive, but this year all that changed. In October, a team of Australian scientists made history when they revived dead hearts from cadavers and successfully transplanted them into awaiting patients.
About 20 minutes after the hearts had stopped beating, doctors put them inside a machine, dubbed the “heart in a box,” which supplied the vital organ with oxygen. After removing the heart from the box it was injected with a preservation solution, designed to keep it fresh. This was done thanks to a perfusion-based machine, named OCS-HEART.
“So those two things coming together [the console and preservation solution] almost like a perfect storm, have allowed this sort of transplantation of a heart that's stopped beating to occur," Professor Bob Graham, executive director of the Victor Chang Institute, the facility behind the preservation solution, told ABC News.
Source: MedicalDaily
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