“With standard hypothermic preservation, we only have about four hours to get the heart from the donor to recipient. Before this technology, transplant teams would place the donor heart on ice in a cooler to preserve it during transport. This portable “Heart in a Box” device reanimates the heart and simulates the environment inside the human body pumping warm, oxygenated blood through the heart while it is transported for transplant.
When circulatory death is declared, surgeons remove the stopped heart from the donor within minutes then connect it to the TransMedics Organ Care System™ (OCS™) Heart. Instead, death is declared when their heart and respiratory system shutdown, either naturally or because life sustaining care is discontinued. With DCD, the donor experienced similar events with no chance of recovery, but they do not meet the criteria for brain death. Traditionally, heart transplants use hearts from organ donors who have been declared brain dead following a catastrophic event, such a traumatic injury or drug overdose, but their heart remained beating, usually with mechanical assistance. Estimates suggest that this updated approach could increase the number of available donor hearts for transplant by up to 30 percent in the United States. That’s changing thanks to new technology nicknamed “Heart in a Box” that resuscitates a stopped heart, keeping it pumping outside of the body until it can be transplanted into a waiting patient. Until recently, hearts from donors who experience circulatory death were not considered for donation. Jerry Dorsey_First DCD Heart Transplant Recipient in IllinoisĬHICAGO - For the first time in Illinois, surgeons at Northwestern Medicine’s Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute successfully transplanted a heart donated after circulatory death (DCD).
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