Normothermia is the condition at which a body is at normal temperature, which is essential for healthy cell functioning. Physicians at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of Surgery, U.S., have transplanted Alabama’s first patient with a cadaver liver that was recovered from the donor and “kept alive” and preserved at body temperature instead of the standard cold solution — a technique that enables the patient to receive a liver that surgeons can watch produce bile before it is transplanted. The transplant was performed as part of a clinical trial using a normothermic machine perfusion technique.
Surgeons place the cadaver liver in the normothermic machine, which then pumps the organ with warm, oxygenated blood and nutrition at or just below body temperature for up to 24 hours before transplant. Dr. Devin Eckhoff, M.D., director of UAB’s Division of Transplantation, says the technique has shown great success in European studies and appears to provide a significant improvement in the quality of the transplanted cadaver organ. Research efforts such as this clinical trial have focussed on overcoming the limitations of cold storage, which is the current universal standard for organ preservation, with a move toward normothermic machine perfusion. Preliminary evidence from clinical trials in Europe has shown organ preservation by normothermic machine perfusion to be superior to static cold storage, a breakthrough that could be a major benefit to those with end-stage liver disease.