http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2014/08/09/this-next-big-leap-for-organ-transplants/5AGyD8UCgT7YCafkbtzkkM/story.html
Is this the next big leap for organ transplants?
For decades an ordinary picnic cooler has been the the best way to transport donated organs. One entrepreneur thinks we can do much better — and save more lives.
By Scott Helman
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TransMedics settled on a plan early on to become a four-organ company, aiming to build portable organ preservation devices to care for hearts, lungs, livers, and kidneys — each of them maintained at warm temperatures and functioning as if inside the body. "We used to call it the rugged womb," says Rick Blanchard, who led an outside design team in the early years.
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TransMedics, with about 70 employees today, has raised roughly $200 million in funding to date. The fruit of its labor is the Organ Care System, an intricate device on wheels that mimics the physiology of the body. When a heart is removed from a donor, it's placed in a small clear plastic module, connected to a series of tubes, and perfused with oxygenated blood from the donor, along with nutrients and hormones delivered through a proprietary solution. The heart continues to beat as if in the chest, like something out of science fiction. (TransMedics says its technology at least doubles the time a heart can remain outside the body, to about 12 hours.) The module fits inside a waist-high cart bearing a diagnostic system for assessing how well the organ is functioning. The whole device, which the company assembles at its Andover headquarters, is easily transportable inside a van, SUV, or plane.
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The liver and kidney versions aren't likely to be available until 2016 at the earliest. If I were a living donor then, being asked to allow the transplant team to ship my kidney or liver section, instead of shipping me to have my surgery on site with the recipient, why wouldn't I insist they use this technology?