Procedures used in life support and to preserve organs in deceased human donors might one day need to be re-evaluated in the wake of a study that restored some cell function in pigs one hour after death.
Currently, a perfusion technique called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation is used in hospital settings to support patients whose heart, lungs or both have ceased to function. The Yale team showed that, after six hours of perfusion, OrganEx did much better than ECMO in terms of getting fluids flowing again in arteries and organs. And whereas ECMO only slows cell death, OrganEx greatly improved the cellular architecture in tissues, including in the brain.
Increasingly, ECMO is one of the treatments physicians use in this scenario. The technique uses the patient’s own blood, or in some cases blood from a donor, to mitigate organ damage caused by a lack of oxygenation and blood flow. The ECMO system was first used in the early 1970s to treat a patient with acute respiratory failure. It is now used routinely by more than 500 centres worldwide as a life-saving intervention in patients whose hearts, lungs or both have stopped working.
Where the use of ECMO becomes more ethically fraught is in the preservation of organs in people who have died.
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