Jennifer Byrne , 2025-05-19 11:00:00
Key takeaways:
- The collaboration aims to improve the recovery and assessment of livers for transplantation.
- Increasing the number of healthy, viable livers could expand access to transplantation and improve patient outcomes.
A new partnership between OrganOx Ltd. and ProCure On-Demand seeks to improve the efficiency and quality of liver recovery and availability for transplantation, according to a press release.
The collaboration combines the OrganOx metra normothermic machine perfusion (NMP) platform with ProCure’s surgical, perfusion, preservation and logistics services. The NMP technology, which has been used in more than 5,000 LTs, is designed to maintain donor livers in a metabolically active state after removal from the body, allowing for functional evaluation prior to transplant.
“Transplantation can be considered one of the oldest and newest fields in medicine with records dating back to medieval times. However modern day transplantation is one of the youngest fields in medicine — it’s less than 100 years old,” Amy Der-Ching Lu, MD, MPH, MBA, FACS, ProCure’s director of abdominal procurement, told Healio. “The OrganOx perfusion technology has been a game-changer in the field of transplantation. These new advances have exponentially changed our ability to provide quality care to patients and expand access to liver transplantation.”
According to the release, OrganOx will support ProCure’s clinical teams and offer education and certification through an exclusive training program. The partnership also will provide transplant centers and organ procurement organizations additional clinical services for facilitating the recovery process.
Healio spoke with Lu about the increased need for viable donor livers and how the collaboration is designed to keep up with that demand.
Healio: How will this partnership help expand access to LT?
Lu: OrganOx’s normothermic machine perfusion machine allows organs to be preserved or stored for a longer time. The ability to store organs for a longer period allows more patients access to these organs.
ProCure’s ability and specialty in personnel for surgical services and logistics allow us to get these machines to transplant centers and to patients who might not have been afforded access in the past.
Healio: How could integration of this NMP technology affect patient outcomes?
Lu: Normothermic technology has been proven to help livers “heal” on the machine by providing nutritional support and oxygenated blood, so that it mimics the natural body. These livers are less traumatized than they have been historically, when they were preserved by being put in an icebox and then thawed.
Going into transplant with a less traumatized liver will allow the surgery to go more smoothly and be better tolerated by patients. The surgery is faster and therefore patients will recover faster.
Healio: How might this partnership alleviate logistical challenges in LT, particularly in rural or underserved areas?
Lu: OrganOx’s platform as a high-technology device company and ProCure’s ability as a logistical and personnel support company meld in a perfect combination.
The machine allows the liver to be stored for longer periods than traditional storage and therefore can be transported further. Also, by having the logistical mechanisms in place to deliver the machine and the personnel to help get the liver on the machine, we can travel the machine to hospitals that might not otherwise be able to use this technology.
e. We have a staff of full-time, localized surgeons in all regions of the country, so we can shorten the time it takes to get to a donor on short notice.
Sometimes donor conditions mandate “rapid recovery” or “expedited recovery” because the donor is unstable. Additionally, sometimes the patient who is offered the liver cannot get from their home to the transplant center. Particularly in rural areas, some patients travel more than 4 hours just to get to a transplant center.
By preserving the liver on this machine, we can enable access to patients for whom this might not have historically been possible.
Healio: How do you foresee collaborations like this reshaping the future of organ transplantation in the U.S.?
Lu: Unfortunately, the demand for transplants continues to increase in the U.S. as well as globally. This technology allows us to utilize livers that may not have been able to be used in the past.
The current technology affects the human resources that transplant centers or organ banks require to run and transport the machine. With this type of collaboration, we could take that burden off those transplant centers and organ banks and increase the number of viable livers for transplant.
Healio: What barriers or challenges remain in LT?
Lu: The challenges continue to be in educating the public about the importance of donation.
Additionally, as these new and complex technologies emerge, we face the challenge of understanding best practices to improve machine utilization and access to as many people as possible. In this way, we can increase the number of organs transplanted and lives saved in the United States.
Healio: What else would you like to emphasize to our readers?
Lu: The new advances that have been made in transplantation have exponentially changed our ability to care for these patients. As technology grows, we need to increase access to that technology. As a nationwide surgical network, I think ProCure has the potential to help the partnership grow in terms of doing that work.
For more information:
Amy Der-Ching Lu, MD, MPH, MBA, FACS can be reached at alu@procureodx.com.
