Researchers in Japan have reportedly developed a new way to store donor organs far longer than has traditionally been possible, a finding that could lead to more transplants.
New Scientist magazine said on November 7 that investigators revived rat hearts after they had been in storage for ten days. Applying the technique to human organs could "lead to organ banks similar to blood banks ... [and] would allow doctors to avoid the frantic dash to bring suitable organs straight from donors to the operating table," New Scientist said.
Scientists Kunihiro Seki and colleagues at Kanagawa University in Japan developed the storage technique after observing that tiny mites called tardigrades can withstand extreme conditions for more than a century by losing most of the water in their half-millimeter bodies. Tardigrades use the sugar trehalose to stabilize their structure. To determine if such a mechanism could be used in the organs of mammals, the scientists flushed rat hearts with trehalose solution before packing them in silica gel to remove the water from their cells, New Scientist said. Within half an hour of resuscitating the hearts ten days later, the hearts started beating again.
In other news from Japan, the country's first lung transplant from living donors was performed on October 28 when a 24-year-old woman received half of her mother's left lung and a third of her sister's right lung, according to the Associated Press. The recipient was expected to regain about half of her lung capacity, while her sister and mother were expected to lose about 20% of theirs.
Although Japan changed its laws in June 1997 to allow organs to be taken upon the brain death of the donor, no heart, liver, or lung transplants ensued (Transplant News Network, October 1, 1998). The Associated Press has cited cultural beliefs and widespread mistrust of doctors as reasons for the lack of donor organs in Japan.
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Summary of New Scientist story:
http://www.newscientist.com/ns/981107/ntardigrades.htmlKunihiro Seki and Masato Toyoshima describe their observations of tardigrades in correspondence in the October 29 edition of Nature (1998;395:853-854).
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