New York Huaqi Bioengineering

Overview: New York Huaqi Bioengineering(NYHB) develops new products that preserve and enhance the overall health and functionality of human organsdonated for transplant. NYHB has designed and tested its first twoproducts to preserve and rehabilitate human livers. These liver products directly address the most crucial problem in human organ transplantation –- a desperate shortage of healthy donor organs. Livers present the most challenging transplant preservation issues of all human organs, and so a system that works for livers is an ideal prototypefor systems to support other organs. Preliminary work is underway for heart and lung preservation.

Problem: Surgeons successfully transplant donor livers into patients, adults and children, with a range of terminal liver diseases including several varieties of hepatitis, sclerosis, and cancer. Currently, about 17,000 American adults and children have been medically approved for liver transplants and wait anxiously for donated livers. The list grows every year. Severe shortages of donor organs mean that 1,500 people die on? waiting every year. Tragically, hospitals must discard about 250,000 “suboptimal” donor livers each year because of their health and condition. Many rejected livers come from older donors, and those with a high BMI, diabetes or other conditions.

Transplants of livers from live donors result in high incidences of pre- and post-operative complications for donors and recipients, as do those from circulatory death donors (DCD). That leaves only those organs extracted from “brain dead” donors (3% of deaths) available for transplant thus exacerbating worldwide donor shortages.

Immediately upon losing their blood supply, all ex vivo livers begin rapid deterioration. Current methods and materials succeed at maintaining adequate viability and health of scarce donated organs for only about 4 to 6 hours. Rapid deterioration limits, pressures and complicates selection of recipients, shipment of healthy organs to genetically compatible patients and preparation by the surgical team. More effective preservation of ex vivo organs for long periods would improve clinical outcomes. The ability to treat marginal donor organs effectively and return them to health would help to mitigate, or even eliminate entirely, the worldwide crisis-level shortages of transplant-viable donor organs.

CHILPS and ESLGS are mainly researched on livers of rats and pigs. And now they are testing on hearts and lungs of rats and pigs. The company hopes the products will make contribtions to address the organ shortage on the world.