A transplant team at a Birmingham hospital has achieved a world first after resuscitating a liver that would have previously been considered unviable. Surgeons at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham successfully revived the organ for transplantation by pumping oxygenated blood through it after a journey of more than 200 miles inside an ice box.
The liver, which was recovered from a cardiac death patient, had taken seven hours to arrive in Birmingham, a delay which would have significantly increased the risk of graft failure if the transplant was carried out in the conventional way.
However, after being resuscitated using a ‘warm blood’ machine, the surgical team at QEHB was able to transplant the revived liver into a patient who had been on the waiting list for a new organ. Although other transplant centres around the world have carried out the same resuscitation technique on discarded livers, or tested similar procedures on animal models, the team at QEHB became the first in the world to successfully transplant a revived liver graft from a cardiac death donor into a patient.
The entire process took around 18 hours from the organ first being retrieved to completion of the transplant operation. It involved a team of around a dozen staff led by consultant liver transplant surgeons Mr Thamara Perera, Mr Paolo Muiesan and Mr Hynek Mergental, consultant anaesthetist Dr Hentie Cilliers, and theatre staff.
