The pigs were died in an hour. Cause: cardiac arrest. But six hours after researchers at Yale University hooked up their bodies to a pump that pumps nutrient-rich fluids, their organs began to show signs of life again.
Although organs do not suddenly begin to function properly, some of the cellular damage caused by loss of blood flow after death appears to have been reversed. The pig’s heart emits electrical activity. The cells in their kidneys, liver and lungs were back to work and showed signs of repairing themselves. Discover, announced Wednesday in the magazine Nature, suggesting that cell death may be delayed longer than is currently possible. If those processes can be slowed down, that means more organs have to be saved for transplant.
Brendan Parent, assistant professor of bioethics at New York University, said: “This new system shows that we can not only slow down the process of cell damage, but can actually activate process at the genetic level for cell repair. research but author of a comment in Nature with it. “This may force us to reconsider what we have decided is ‘dead’.”
In 2019, the Yale team challenged the idea that brain death is final when they reported that they had revive part of the pig’s brain hours after the animal is slaughtered. For the current experiment, the researchers wanted to see if the same method, in which a blood substitute is introduced into an animal’s circulatory system, could also be used to revive other organs. are not.
Author Nenad Sestan, a neuroscientist at Yale, told reporters on a call Tuesday: “We’ve restored some of the functions of cells across many vital organs that should have otherwise been lost. die without our intervention. “These cells are working hours after they shouldn’t, and this tells us that cell death can be halted and their function restored in many organs. even an hour after death.”
Deepali Kumar, president of the American Transplantation Society and a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, says that with further improvement, the system could one day be used to expand the source of human organs. available for donation. “There is a significant shortage of organs for transplantation, and we certainly need new technologies that can help improve the organ supply,” she said.
In the United States, about 106,000 people are on the national transplant waiting list, and 17 people die each day waiting for their organs to be harvested, according to the federal Health Services and Resources Administration. Although the demand is great, around 20 percent organs discarded every year due to poor quality. That could mean they’re too old or damaged, which can happen when organs are cut off from their supply of oxygen-rich blood for too long.
Standard practice for preserving organs for transplantation is static cryopreservation. Rapid cooling of organs after resection reduces their oxygen demand and may prevent cell death, but does not save every organ. There is growing interest in using a technique called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO, for patients who cannot be resuscitated, in order to preserve their organs for transplantation. Often used to provide life support to patients with severely damaged hearts or lungs, ECMO machines pump blood outside the body to remove carbon dioxide and replenish oxygen, then return the blood to the body.
