A New Approach to Transport of Liver Grafts : (Ex Vivo Normothermic Machine Perfusion with Portable Systems)

Liver transplantation is often the last treatment option for patients with massive liver disease and associated liver dysfunction. However, the transport of donor organs is often done via static cold storage (SCS), during which the organ is not perfused and can thus be injured. The DeLiver research project was aimed to improve this situation and a new approach to transporting livers grafts using normothermic machine perfusion (NMP) was developed. At the same time, the OCS™ Liver, Transmedics Inc., was developed. This NMP system is presented in this paper in comparison with the DeLiver system. The comparison of the DeLiver system with commercially available systems cannot be completed as there are no explicit markers to evaluate the effectiveness of the systems. Possible steps to further improve the use of NMP approaches are proposed.