While the maximum transplant time is usually four hours, one donor heart was successfully transplanted after 12 hours of flight.
- Currently, transplanting hearts is often a race against time: they generally must be transplanted within four hours of being removed from the donor.
- At the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, surgeons Guillaume Lebreton and Pascal Leprince successfully transplanted a heart after a 12-hour flight.
- The heart was preserved using a technique called “oxygenated hypothermic perfusion.”
This is a world first, hailed by its investigators in an editorial from The Lancet. To reach Paris, a donor heart traveled 6,750 kilometers over the Atlantic Ocean, surviving a 12-hour plane ride. It came from a 48-year-old West Indian man who, three days after having a stroke, was declared brain dead.
“A previously unimaginable feat”
At the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, surgeons Guillaume Lebreton and Pascal Leprince successfully transplanted the heart that came from afar into a 70-year-old man suffering from terminal heart disease. “Both ventricles of the heart immediately began to function normally,” they say. The recipient was discharged from the hospital 30 days later.
Guillaume Lebreton and Pascal Leprince believe that it is “a previously unimaginable feat in the field of organ transplantation.” This success was achieved in a pilot study called PEGASE, which aims to determine whether successful transplantation is possible when the heart has been preserved for prolonged periods, particularly during travel from Martinique and Guadeloupe.
How was the heart preserved?
The heart was preserved using a technique called hypothermic oxygen perfusion, which involves keeping the heart cold while oxygenated fluid is pumped through it by a machine. Although there have already been clinical trials exploring this technique, this is the first time it has been tested for such a long transport duration.
If the results obtained on this occasion are successfully reproduced, doctors believe that this technique could “redefining the heart transplantation landscape with unlimited geographic supply and reduced time constraints.”
The increase in the number of potential donors geographically could indeed have an impact on waiting times. In the United States, for example, about 3,000 people are put on the waiting list for a heart every day, but only 2,000 hearts are available each year.
“We flew economy class”
Finally, “we wanted this operation to be reproducible and for transport costs to remain bearable”, specify Guillaume Lebreton and Pascal Leprince. “Contrary to what is generally done for the transport of donor hearts, which uses expensive private jets, we flew in economy class aboard an airliner (Air France, Editor’s note)”, conclude the two French doctors.
Currently, transplanting hearts is often a race against time: they generally must be transplanted within four hours of being removed from the donor.
