5-year Perfusion Programme of Human Abdominal Organs
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Investigating the use of normothermic perfused organs for organ assessment, preservation, modification and therapy
IRAS ID
254702
Contact name
Peter Friend
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Oxford / Clinical Trials and Research Governance
Duration of Study in the UK
5 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
Normothermic perfusion is a way of delivering oxygen and nutrients to organs at normal body temperature. This allows organs to be kept in a living and functioning state outside the body for up to a week. Our group have both developed and used this technology to preserve livers and kidneys prior to transplantation contributing towards its acceptance as a clinical treatment in liver transplantation.
However, the opportunity for normothermic organ perfusion offers several unique opportunities which are yet to be exploited for clinical benefit. Firstly, the temperature, oxygen level and blood flow can be altered which enables us to study the best conditions for preservation of organs. Moreover, there is a window of time in which new therapies can be delivered to a ‘living’ organ which allows us to assess how therapies might change the immune profile of the organs such that it may be less readily recognised by a transplant patient’s immune system and also the effect of cancer and gene therapies on the organ both in terms of toxicity and in terms of how the organ processes and excretes the drug. This information is fundamental in the development of new drug delivery regimes.
While porcine perfused organs have provided a strong basis for our preclinical work, differences between human and pig anatomy, physiology and immunology mean that conclusions lack relevance to man. Consequently, we propose perfusing ex vivo human organs, initially retrieved for human transplantation from consenting donors, which are found to not be suitable for implantation. We hypothesise that normothermic perfused organs will enable us to i) establish conditions that will improve organ preservation, ii) study how cellular therapies alter the immune profile of the organ , and iii) investigate the pharmacokinetics and toxicity of cancer and gene therapies to support development of drug delivery schedules.REC name
South West - Frenchay Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/SW/0133
Date of REC Opinion
1 Oct 2020
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion