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).
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.