This one’s a step above a picnic cooler: Boston devicemaker TransMedics has developed a “living organ transplant” device that keeps organs in better condition prior to transplant surgery. Rather than keeping them cooling on ice – the current standard – TransMedics’ portable warm blood perfusion system keeps organs functioning outside of the body.
The company just raised $20 million from 11 investors, according to a regulatory filing. Calls and emails to the company regarding the fundraise have yet to be returned. The privately held TransMedics is well-capitalized, however: It has raised well over $100 million since its launch in 1998.
One benefit of the technology? It could help increase the number of available donor hearts, because it can resuscitate hearts from donors that have had circulatory deaths.
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Most recently, The Lancet published an interesting TransMedics study and accompanying editorial, “Donor heart preservation: straight up, or on the rocks?”
The short-term outcomes for hearts in cold static storage were comparable to those in TransMedics’ organ care system, the article said. But the investigators observed:
… that the Organ Care System was able to identify pathologically abnormal hearts, and that potential recipients of these hearts were spared exposure to suboptimum organs.
These abnormalities might not actually hinder a heart’s viability for transplant, though – so more study needs to be made, the Lancet article suggests.
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The Boston Globe ran a feature last year on the company – and CEO Waleed Hassanein‘s keen disappointment that organs used for transplant were transported in an ordinary picnic cooler.
Here he was witnessing arguably the pinnacle of man’s medical advances — using a heart from one person to save the life of another — and yet he was fixated on the ice, which seemed like such a crude means of transport. “I’m standing there looking at this thing like, there has to be a better way,” Hassanein says. “All this investment of time and effort to be able to put it in a cooler?”
Here’s a video on how the device works:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQmAs1Jsb9o]