To beat the heart continued.

The cardiac surgery and anesthesia-resuscitation teams at the Rennes University Hospital have achieved a great first at their level by keeping a heart “alive” outside of any body for several hours for the purposes of a heart transplant.

The operation took place on March 26 and was made possible by the American technology Organ Care System, with which only three French hospitals are equipped.

It is intended as an alternative to the usual technique of keeping the heart stationary in ice.

With this new process, the still beating heart is taken from a brain dead person before being placed in a machine the size of a cooler where it will be infused with oxygenated blood.

The Rennes teams then took the plane and then the car with their hearts pounding on board.

For six hours, from harvesting to transplantation, the organ continued to beat during this operation which "is a success", indicates the Rennes University Hospital.

A cost of more than 30,000 euros per operation

The Breton establishment emphasizes that thanks to this technique, some countries such as England are now able to reanimate hearts taken from a donor stopped, thus making it possible to increase the number of transplants carried out each year.

However, the intervention has a cost of more than 30,000 euros per operation, to which are added the travel costs of the sampling team.

The Rennes University Hospital still sees it as a cause of hope for the sick.

"Applied to the heart, liver or even the lungs, this approach brings transplantation into a new era, without ever calling into question the effectiveness of more" traditional "cold preservation techniques", underlines the Breton establishment.

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