Normothermic Machine Perfusion of Marginal Donor Livers
Research type
Research Study
Full title
The Development of Normothermic Machine Liver Perfusion for Improvement of Marginal Human Donor Liver Quality and the Development of Novel Therapies for Treatment of Toxic Inflammatory and Malignant Liver Disease.
IRAS ID
141693
Contact name
Simon Charles Afford
Contact email
Research summary
Chronic inflammatory and malignant liver diseases accounts for millions of deaths worldwide. For the majority of sufferers there are few therapies and liver transplantation offers the only potential cure. The demand for donor organs exceeds supply, and many livers are rejected for transplantation because of damage caused during organ retrieval and excessive fat. A machine which permits perfusion of the donor liver after retrieval with a warm solution containing essential blood factors required for maintenance of liver function has recently been developed for potential clinical use. Normothermic machine liver perfusion (NMLP) offers the potential to assess and improve the quality and function of the donor organ, which is important for livers which are currently deemed non transplantable. We estimate that if successful, NMLP could increase the number of organs available for transplantation from the "unusable" pool by as much as 20%.
Besides this direct clinical application, NMLP offers exciting research potential in the area of liver biology and mechanisms of injury. We also believe it will offer the opportunity to design and test new treatment strategies.
A very limited published study is encouraging. We wish to carry out a programme of research using the Organ Assist NMLP device. We will determine the optimum conditions required for support and hopefully improvement of donor livers damaged by fat and/or reperfusion injury. We will focus on two key research and development areas:-1.We will conduct NMLP procedures on non transplantable livers to optimise the conditions required to maintain organ stability for as long as possible.
2.We will conduct further experiments designed to assess the potential of the device for the study of immune cell recruitment and activation; cellular targeting of novel therapeutics for treatment of liver disease; preparation of isolated liver cell populations for research and possible later clinical use.
REC name
London - Surrey Borders Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
13/LO/1926
Date of REC Opinion
18 Dec 2013
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion