Isis Innovation, the technology transfer arm at the University of Oxford and Canada

A new technique can preserve organs for days before transplanting them, US researchers claim.

‘Supercooling’ combines chilling the organ and pumping nutrients and oxygen through its blood vessels. Tests on animals, showed supercooled livers remained viable for three days, compared with less than 24 hours using current technology.

If it works on human organs, it has the potential to transform organ donation.

As soon as an organ is removed from the body, the individual cells it is made from begin to die. Cooling helps slow the process as it reduces the metabolic rate of the cells.

Meanwhile, surgeons in the UK carried out the first ‘warm liver’ transplant in March 2013 which used an organ kept at body temperature in a machine.

The technique being reported first hooks the organ up to a machine which perfuses the organ with nutrients. It is then cooled to minus 6C.

In experiments on rat livers, the organs could be preserved for three days.

One of the researchers, Dr Korkut Uygun, from the Harvard Medical School, told the BBC the technique could lead to donated organs being shared around the world.

‘That would lead to better donor matching, which would reduce-long term organ rejection and complications, which is one of the major issues in organ transplant,’ he said.

He also argued that organs which are normally rejected, as they would not survive to the transplant table, might be suitable if they were preserved by supercooling.

‘That could basically eliminate waiting for a organ, but that is hugely optimistic,’ Dr Uygun said.

Further experiments are now needed to see if the technology can be scaled up from preserving a 10g (0.35oz) rat liver to a 1.5kg (3.3lb) human liver.

The researchers believe the technology could work on other organs as well. BBC

TAVI is a safe alternative to redo cardiac surgery for failing bioprosthetic valves, according to research presented at the ESC Congress today by Dr Spyridon Katsanos from The Netherlands. The findings suggest that transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) is a treatment alternative for inoperable elderly patients and high risk patients with failing bioprostheses.

Use of bioprosthetic heart valves has dramatically increased (from 18% in 1991 to 59% in 2003), mainly in older patients with comorbidities. This is due to the increased risk of bleeding complications associated with lifelong use of anticoagulation for mechanical prostheses.

But structural valve deterioration is one the main complications associated with bioprosthetic heart valves. In large registries including more than 300 000 patients undergoing aortic valve replacement the reoperation rate for patients receiving a bioprosthesis was 3.1% at 11-13 years of follow-up compared with 2.3% reoperation rate for recipients of an aortic mechanical prosthesis.1

Dr Katsanos said:

The results of a Phase 3 clinical trial involving UCL researchers, called REMoxTB, has found that replacing one of the drugs with the antibiotic moxifloxacin in the standard six-month treatment regimen did not allow the treatment time for tuberculosis (TB) patients to be shortened to four months.

The trial confirmed the safety of daily moxifloxacin over four months of therapy. Researchers concluded that the safety of moxifloxacin, combined with its activity against TB, supports the continued clinical testing of moxifloxacin as a component of other novel regimens.

Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers have created a way to develop personalized gene therapies for patients with retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a leading cause of vision loss. The approach, the first of its kind, takes advantage of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell technology to transform skin cells into retinal cells, which are then used as a patient-specific model for disease study and preclinical testing.

Using this approach, researchers led by Stephen H. Tsang, MD, PhD, showed that a form of RP caused by mutations to the gene MFRP (membrane frizzled-related protein) disrupts the protein that gives retinal cells their structural integrity. They also showed that the effects of these mutations can be reversed with gene therapy. The approach could potentially be used to create personalized therapies for other forms of RP, as well as other genetic diseases.