They compared OrganEx to a more traditional machine that hospitals use to save the lives of patients with severe heart and lung conditions by restoring their circulation, in order to see if OrganEx worked.
The organs that were treated with OrganEx had less signs of damage than those that were treated with ECMO. The system can repair some functions in cells that would otherwise be dead, according to the researchers. The researchers observed how heart cells from OrganEx pigs were contracting, but they didn't see the same contraction in samples from theECMO group.
Nenad Sestan, professor of neurobiology at the Yale School of Medicine, said, "These cells are functioning hours after they should not be, and what this tells us is that the demise of cells can be halted, and their function can be restored in multiple vital organs even an hour after We don't know if they are transplantable.
A previous machine was used in the research. The first report of BrainEx was by MIT Technology Review. It used a series of pumps and filters to mimic the rhythm of natural blood circulation, pumping a similar chemical mix through the blood vessels in a pig's brain to restoreoxygen flow to the organ up to six hours after the animal's death. The team did not detect any electrical brain activity that would indicate the brain had regained consciousness, but it kept many of the cells inside the brain alive for more than a day.
Tissue and organ death can occur when a mammal's blood flow is restricted, such as after a stroke. The organs begin to swell after the heart stops beating. This can be circumvented by the OrganEx perfusate fluid. An associate research neuroscientist at Yale School of Medicine who worked on the study likened OrganEx to steroids. He said that the findings suggest that cells don't die as quickly as we thought, which opens up the possibility for interventions to keep them alive.
He said that the progression toward massive permanent cell failure does not happen so quickly that it can't be fixed.
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