On the last day of March, surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital began surgery that they hoped would lead to lasting changes in the way the kidneys are implanted in people.
The patient that morning was not a human. It was a pig and was anesthetized on the table. The pig had one kidney missing and needed an implant.
Kidneys usually need to be transplanted within 24-36 hours, but the kidneys that enter the pig were removed 10 days before and frozen earlier that morning.
No one ever transplanted frozen organs into large animals. There were a lot of things that didn’t work out.
“I think there’s about a 50% chance that it will work,” said Kolkout Wygun, a surgical professor and team leader, before the surgery. Dr. Uygun is on the Scientific Advisory Committee of Sylvatica Biotech Inc., a company that develops freezing methods for organ maintenance.
But the promise from the organs of freezing and storage is fantastic.
There is a severe and continuous shortage of kidneys for transplants – That’s all 92,000 People are on the waiting list. One reason is that the 24-36 hour window is very short, so limit the number of recipients that are good matches.
How good is it to have a bank of stored frozen organs, as organ transplants can be like an elective surgery?
At least, it was a decades-long dream of a transplant surgeon.
However, the medical researchers’ attempts to freeze organs were thwarted at every turn. In many cases, ice crystals formed organs and destroyed them. The material was also intended to stop the crystals from forming, the anti-freeze agent was toxic and killed cells. Or the frozen organs became very brittle and cracked.
Source: www.nytimes.com
