Most livers collected today from a donor are stored in ice at a temperature of about 4 ° C before being reimplanted.
But many end up damaged and unusable. This was the case for 500 of them in 2017 in the United Kingdom, according to one of the authors of the study, Constantin Coussios of Oxford University.
The loss is all the more damaging as demand exceeds supply. "About one in five patients died on the UK wait list for liver transplants last year," said the biomedical engineer.
Chilling a liver is a method that has "barely changed in 30 years," he added. The more modern technique, with a normothermic liver perfusion machine, recreates the conditions of the human body, including pumping blood and nutrients.
For the first time, a comparison by a European study of 120 preserved livers and 100 others refrigerated in the ice showed that there were half as many losses at the end of the race.
Mr. Coussios is the technical director of OrganOx, the manufacturer that patented these machines in 2016. They are marketed in Europe, Canada and India.
The study is "a convincing demonstration," commented Nature, a professor of medicine at the University of Innsbruck (Austria), Stefan Schneeberger. He added that the long-term success of transplants following this conservation method remained to be evaluated.
The other question that researchers do not answer is the cost of both techniques compared to their respective benefits. Asked by AFP on the subject, Mr. Coussios said that the machine was "not necessarily expensive if we look at the cost of keeping a patient alive while waiting for a transplant," without to be more specific.