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A team of scientists, including Dr David Nasralla and Professor Peter Friend from the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, have had their research featured on the cover of the prestigious journal Nature.

They found that preserving livers at body temperature helps to improve transplant success and to increase the number of viable donor livers available for transplant, which could lead to shorter waiting lists for patients and lower mortality rates.

In the first randomized study of its kind, the Consortium for Organ Preservation in Europe (COPE) clinical trial team at NDS compared conventional cold storage in an ice box with a technique called normothermic machine perfusion in 220 liver transplant patients. The device used for normothermic machine preservation was developed by OrganOx Ltd, a MedTech business spun-out from the University of Oxford as a result of a collaboration between Professor Friend and Professor Constantin Coussios (Institute of Biomedical Engineering).

NatureDr David Nasralla, who is lead author of the study, said: 'Having our work published by a journal as prestigious as Nature is a wonderful achievement and also a testament to the huge amount of work that went into this study and the two decades of dedication from Professor Friend and Professor Coussios that preceded it. Being featured on the front cover of the journal is a great privilege and unexpected honour that I think any academic could only dream of.'

The research appears in the 3 May 2018 edition of Nature.

The research was also recently featured as a news article on the University of Oxford website and BBC Health News.