As organ transplantation needs are currently unmet, the findings of a neuroscientist affiliated with Yale University located in Connecticut, the United States, make it now possible to restore function in multiple organs more than an hour after death, giving hope to patients desperately in need of a transplant.
“What [neuroscientist Nenad] Sestan’s team did is gain time prior to organ recovery – which is important when we talk about expanding the donor pool,” says Gerald Brandacher, a transplant surgeon at the Johns Hopkins Reconstructive Transplantation Program.
The solution Sestan’s team concocted – named OrganEx – is a brew of amino acids, vitamins, metabolites, and a drug cocktail of 13 different compounds meant to, once pumped through the circulatory system, restore the functions of kidneys, heart, liver, and brain of a body deceased for more than an hour, thus rescuing them. By recovering multiple organs with one intervention, it would be possible to boost the organ supply. According to the World Health Organization, only 10% of people in need of an organ get to have a transplant because thousands of donated organs are discarded due to a lack of proper and quick preservation.
