The University of Oxford spinout has developed two of the most complex medical devices ever designed and built in the UK. They maintain livers and kidneys in a functioning state outside the body for at least twice as long as conventional cold preservation techniques, dramatically increasing the number of transplants for patients, eradicating night-time operations for clinicians, and reducing overall healthcare costs for providers.
A third, patient-connected device can also be used to provide ‘liver dialysis’ using either a human or porcine organ outside the body, to help patients in liver failure to recover without the need for a transplant.
Operating at body temperature (37C), the devices replicate the physiological conditions of an organ within the body by perfusing it with a red-cell suspension reconstituted from donor blood of the same blood type. This allows fully automated, operator-independent preservation of an organ in a functioning state outside the body for periods of up to 24 hours clinically and several days pre-clinically.
The technology, which was initially designed to preserve livers, has enabled over 6,000 transplants across four continents and twelve countries. Medical facilities adopting the technology have reported up to a 30% net increase in transplants, with waiting times and waiting list mortality cut by more than half.
Chair of the MacRobert Award judging panel, Dr Alison Vincent CBE FREng, said: 'Despite facing stiff competition from our other two finalists, Synthesia and Microsoft Azure Fibre, OrganOx is a worthy winner of the MacRobert Award, which has been celebrating the strength, creativity and global impact of British engineering for more than half a century. OrganOx has developed a truly game-changing and life-saving innovation that is at the forefront of efforts to increase the number of donor organs available for transplantation.'