Canada (Commonwealth Union)_Atrium Health Sanger Heart & Vascular Institute employs a revolutionary portable technology that keeps the heart viable and expands its duration and range during transportation to the recipient. Atrium Health Sanger Heart & Vascular Institute’s innovative technological platform, created by digital health business TransMedics, well preserves donated hearts until transplant, allowing transplant teams to travel further and reach more patients who are in need of a heart transplant.
The TransMedics Organ Care System (OCS) technology is meant to extend the period of time for a donated heart to be transplanted successfully, enabling health institutions that conduct transplants to increase their coverage areas for donors and recipients. The Charlotte, Sanger Heart & Vascular Institute transplant team based in North Carolina, previously only accepted donor hearts located within a 500-mile radius since the organ could only be stored in cold storage for four hours. But the latest method allows the heart to remain alive for up to eight hours and to be transferred from up to 1,000 miles distance.
Additionally, the new technology allowed the admission of hearts with a greater risk profile, such as those from older donors and donors who were originally placed on life support before treatment was withdrawn, a circumstance known as donation after cardiac death. According to Atrium Health representatives, the institution recently performed its first heart transplant with the use of the OCS platform. In the United States, there are over 3,300 individuals who are on the waitlist for a heart transplant. According to the report from the US Department of Health and Human Services Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, 95 of these patients are based in North Carolina.
According to Eric Skipper, MD, a cardiothoracic heart transplant surgeon at Atrium Health Sanger Heart & Vascular Institute, when a heart is removed from a deceased donor due to cardiac death, the portable system revives it and keeps it beating by infusing it with blood from the donor that has been supplemented with nutrients and oxygen. Before the team enters the operating room to do the transplant, the device allows them to thoroughly evaluate the heart’s viability and functional qualities. A media statement issued by Skipper said, “This was a patient who was potentially looking at a long wait for an organ transplant. But because of the ability to utilize this technology, they were able to receive a heart very quickly.”
The US Food and Drug Administration authorized the use of OCS technology in April 2022 for preserving hearts for transplantation following cardiac death. Additionally, the results of a multi-center clinical experiment that compared the usage of the new technique with the conventional cold storage method for transporting donated hearts revealed that 90 patients out of 180 randomized and transplanted patients received organs that were considered unusable prior to the development of OCS. Besides, these participants had a one-year survival rate of 93.3%, compared to a one-year survival rate of 87.3% in the control group that did not use OCS.
According to Joseph Mishkin, MD, an advanced heart failure transplant cardiologist at Sanger Heart & Vascular Institute, “We were always limited to accepting organs from donors who suffered immediate brain death. We now can accept organs from donors who have suffered an irreversible brain injury but do not meet formal brain death criteria. In these instances, the family has decided to withdraw care. The donor’s organs can now be a life-saving gift for others.” Mishkin added, “We face a nationwide shortage of donated organs. I expect this technology to transform the transplant industry, increasing the national donor supply and helping us transplant more patients in need.”
