Jaw-dropping studies in pigs have given hope that new preservation strategies could end a deadly shortage of transplant organs
An operating room in the Yale School of Medicine research lab where during an experiment to slow cellular death, a pig's heart spontaneously began to beat, hours after time of death. The monitor shows fluoroscopic images of a pig brain on the left and a pig heart and chest cavity on the right. After the heart stops pumping, organs must be harvested immediately to be viable for transplant. For this reason, most come from brain-dead organ donors already on life support.
Researchers fixed pig organ tissue in paraffin wax and then sliced the samples micro thin before mounting them to glass slides. Scientists and researchers examined them using a microscope looking for the cellular changes after death that are well known, and easily identifiable.
Our organs thrive because of thousands of little power stations inside every cell, called mitochondria, which transform food into energy that fuels essential activities—including breathing, thinking, and running—while clearing away toxic byproducts. But in the moments after blood flow stops, called ischemia,. The mitochondria burn through dwindling supplies of nutrients and accumulate waste that eventually poisons and kills the cell.
Rising calcium activates enzymes that break down DNA and that chew through the cytoskeleton, which gives the cell its structure. High concentrations of calcium also trigger the mitochondria’s self-destruct buttons, or apoptosis. “But apoptosis is a process that occurs over the course of up to 72 hours, on average,” Parnia says.
Parnia compares this phenomenon to the ruin wrought by earthquakes followed by tsunamis. The earthquake sets the scene, but it’s the tsunami that often inflicts the most harm. “By instituting anti-tsunami measures, or treatments against the secondary injury process, we can save brain function, and that opens up a whole new field of medicine,” Parnia says.
As controls, some animals were untreated; others were treated with ECMO, after the hour elapsed—which was used to pump blood infused with oxygen and free of carbon dioxide, through the body.
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