Today, far too many people in the world are waiting for an organ to be donated so they can resume a life that has been put on hold. Today, far too many people die without their organs being possible to transplant to provide any meaning at all to such death, to provide a new chance for someone waiting. The sad truth is that there is a shortage everywhere.
The reasons several organs are not fit to transplant can be many, but one is that they are generally not in a good state because the time between death and donation has been too long. The team at UGLK in Gothenburg and Lund (Sweden) are trying to do something about this, to improve the status of the organ outside the body so that it can be transplanted. The team works with kidneys, perfusing them with a proprietary fluid to bring the health back to the kidney. Their vision is a world without shortage of transplantable donor kidneys, and we are proud to be working with them towards this vision.
The kidney needs a lot of different nutrients and ingredients provided in a very specific way, but it is possible. The team has already showed that kidneys can be improved to a state where trained transplant surgeons evaluate them as fit for transplantation. The next step is to see how a person with such a revived kidney receives and lives with it.
In this development, the team at CR has been working closely with the team at UGLK to investigate both what need to be in the perfusion liquid, but also how to analytically study it using HPLC methods to get important information for both further development and regulatory documentation. We have had the privilege to be able to work with a high degree of trust where the teams have used each other also as sounding boards and scientific peers. In addition to the CR expertise, the UGLK team has had good value out of the experience CR has from various other cases in med tech, life science and other.
UGLK believes that by restoring function in kidneys that have been retrieved from donors up to four hours from cardiac arrest (four times longer than what is possible today) the numbers of receivers who would be able to step away from the waiting line and restart their lives would increase from 200 to 5000 in Sweden alone.
Want to know more? Go to uglkscience.com
