'Dead' heart brought back to life in pioneering transplant surgery

A desperately ill man's life has been saved after doctors gave him a transplant using a 'dead' heart they had brought back to life.

Medics used a pioneering piece of technology dubbed a 'heart in a box' which can keep a heart preserved and beating for up to eight hours.

Surgeons at Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester carried out the successful transfer to Anthony Anderson.

The 58-year-old, from Swinton, was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy – a disease of the heart muscle – which left him in intensive care and he was placed on the urgent transplant list.

Speaking after the operation, Anthony said: 'When I got the call I felt very emotional – really happy, but of course sad that someone had to die to help me and I will be forever grateful to my donor.'

The renowned hospital is one of only four centres in the world to have carried out the revolutionary procedure.

Only a small handful of patients have so far undergone the treatment, the Manchester Evening News reports.

But doctors believe that it could potentially save countless more lives by allowing a greater number of donor hearts to be used for donation.

About 15 in every 100 patients die while on the waiting list for a heart transplant.

There is always a shortage of hearts and organs have to be transplanted very soon after the donor has died.

But doctors believe the new technology could help save countless more lives – by allowing allowing a greater number of donor hearts to be used for donation.

The team are 'out of this world'

Anthony first began feeling tired and suffering with palpitations in 2002, but overtime his symptoms worsened significantly and he was referred to Wythenshawe Hospital.

Just weeks after his transplant, Anthony was back at home, but continues to be monitored by the team.

He said: 'I think the transplant team at Wythenshawe Hospital are out of this world. I'm getting stronger every day and my plan is now to enjoy retirement with my wife Lisa, a paediatric nurse at Salford Royal.'

How it works

The revolutionary transplant technique was first devised a few years ago, but is not currently widely used.

Doctors are using a technology known as an the Transmedia Organ Care System to resuscitate previously unusable hearts.

It works by pumping blood round the heart to restore functionality. Once the heart is beating again, surgeons are able to assess the donor heart more extensively and reduce the risk of rejection. 

Rajamiyer Venkateswaran, director of transplantation and consultant cardiac surgeon at the hospital explained that this type of transplant is different because it uses a 'Donation After Circulatory Determined Death' (DCD) donor heart.

This is where the donor is not brain dead but has sustained severe brain injury

'In this scenario the treatment of the donor is withdrawn and allows cardiac arrest to happen,' he said.

'The heart is then retrieved from the donor and is resuscitated on the Organ Care System machine.

'I am so proud of our team at the Transplant Centre It is an amazing development as previously we would not have been able to use these hearts for transplantation.

Dr Venkateswaran said he hoped the new procedure will increase the hospital's 25 heart transplants a year by 20 per cent by using hearts from DCD donors.

The highly specialised OCS machine has been funded by a £125,000 donation by the New Start Charity.

Wythenshawe Hospital, run by the University Hopsital of South Manchester NHS Trust, has long been home to one of the UK's top cardiac centres and is home to world-leading experts in heart, lungs and chest surgery. 

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Scientists Succeed In Growing A Beating Human Heart From Stem Cells

Scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical school have successfully grown a human heart from adult skin cells, according to a study published recently.

The breakthrough could be huge news for the 4,000 Americans currently awaiting heart transplants, and the more than 25 million people who suffer heart failure each year. In the United States, approximately 2,500 of the 4,000 people in line for heart transplants actually receive them, indicating a shortage that research like this might be able to address.

According to the journal, the scientists took 73 donor hearts deemed unfit for transplantation, stripped away cells on those hearts and replaced them with skin cells that — using messenger RNA — had been turned into pluripotent stem cells, the kinds of cells that can be specialized to any part of the human body. After causing the stem cells to develop into two types of cardiac cells, the researchers then mimicked the environment a human heart would typically grow within and infused the cardiac cells with a nutrient solution that facilitated growth.

After two weeks, they shocked the hearts with electricity, and lo and behold, the hearts began beating. The tissue inside appeared to be well-structured and functional. Scientists compared the growth of the heart as "building a house with the frame already constructed." 

Ultimately, the researchers aim to grow an entire human heart that is capable of being transplanted. 

"To show that functional myocardial tissue of human scale can be built on this platform, we then partially recellularized human whole-heart scaffolds with human induced pluripotent stem cell–derived cardiomyocytes," the team of scientists wrote in their journal. "Under biomimetic culture, the seeded constructs developed force-generating human myocardial tissue and showed electrical conductivity, left ventricular pressure development, and metabolic function."

The technological development was celebrated on social media. As one user wrote: "Living in the future is awesome."

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Certain hearts 'unfit' for donation no more

 Many hearts are declared unfit for donation due to stress-induced heart failure. But a recent study found that this condition has no bearing on the outcome of a transplant further opening path for up to 30 per cent more heart transplants.

"Systematic utilisation of these hearts would mean a breakthrough for heart transplantation, as more patients could be accepted for transplantation," said  senior lecturer. The study, is based on particulars of 641 potential heart donors in Sweden in the years 2006-2016.

Either these people, who had been declared brain-dead, had said yes to donation during their lives or their survivors had given the go-ahead. As many as 24 per cent of potential donors had acute stress-induced cardiomyopathy, or broken heart syndrome, in which cardiac function is impaired in one part of the heart, while the other parts beat normally. This condition is caused by the massive surge in stress hormones observed in the course of brain death.

The functional impairment appears to be transient: Within a few hours or days, the heart recovers. Nevertheless, there are recommendations that these hearts should not be transplanted. The selection process, therefore, varies from one location to another. To date, the transplantation centre in Gothenburg has had the favourable clinical experience of transplanting hearts with stress-induced heart failure, and there were 42 such cases in the current study.

The results show that when the donors' hearts had been subject to stress-induced heart failure, the outcomes for recipients were no different. Neither was mortality affected; rather, it conformed to the expected 20 per cent rate in both groups after ten years.

"The impairment in cardiac function seems to be temporary and is not caused by coronary artery disease or other heart diseases. This fact fits well with stress-induced heart failure. When we repeatedly examine these hearts, we see that their function recovers quickly," says the researcher.

More studies are to follow the current one, to verify the results. Ending disqualification of donors with stress-induced heart failure is seen as especially urgent since the condition arises more often in young people, whose hearts are otherwise well suited for donation. "We estimate that the supply of donor's hearts could be increased by 20-30 per cent if these hearts are used," he concluded.  


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