A device called "heart in a box" can now reanimate hearts taken from people who have died to be transplanted in heart surgeries. It was already successfully used in 15 cases by surgeons in the U.K. and Australia while awaiting regulatory approval in the U.S., MIT Technology Review reported Tuesday.
The device was developed by an Andover, Massachusetts-based company called Transmedics, and is being increasingly seen as a milestone in the medical field, which has so far relied on donations from brain-dead patients for successful heart transplants. Hearts extracted from dead patients are normally considered too damaged to be of use, according to The Verge. With the device and the reanimation of non-beating hearts, heart transplant operations could increase up to 25 percent, potentially saving more lives, The Telegraph noted.
The "heart in a box" is a wheeled contraption equipped with a tubing system, an oxygen supply and a sterile chamber - all attached to the heart to keep it pumping and fed with blood, nutrients and electrolytes. The technology is also a marked improvement on the current system of storing and transporting donated organs.
Normally, organs are placed in plastic coolers and rushed to hospitals, as they deteriorate quickly in a race against time. The current system can even damage the organ being transported, which is why eight out of 10 hearts never reach patients on time, according to Al Jazeera.
"A human organ has never been kept alive outside of a human body until this machine became a clinical reality. It makes intuitive sense to a layperson to say, 'Instead of having my heart on ice, I want it to be warm. I want it to be beating," said Dr. Abbas Ardehali, of UCLA's heart and lung transplant program, in the report.
Currently, the only fault critics seem to find fault is the "heart in a box" price tag, which is $250,000. This is a hefty amount that could prevent the technology from being widely deployed today.
Transmedics plans to use this technology to help in the preservation of other vital organs as well.
