Latest news straight to your inbox Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

Medics at a Birmingham hospital have achieved a world first by reviving a liver using a groundbreaking technique.

Surgeons at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, in Edgbaston, carried out the procedure by pumping warm oxygenated blood through it, which meant it could be transplanted into patient Satpal Mahal, from Walsall.

The organ had travelled more than 200 miles inside an ice box, and had been recovered from a heart patient who had died.

Although other transplant centres around the world have carried out the same resuscitation technique on discarded livers, or tested similar procedures on animal models, the team at the QE became the first in the world to successfully transplant a revived liver graft from a cardiac death donor into a patient.

Mr Mahal, who was managing director of his own import and export business prior to his illness, said: “I was very confident even though this was a new procedure.

“I knew that I was in the best place with the right physicians and staff. And I have been told that it has been very successful, so it’s a world breaker.”

Mr Mahal, 46, said problems with his liver were first diagnosed almost three years ago, but his condition deteriorated to the point where he was put on transplant waiting list for a new organ about two months ago.

He was discharged from the hospital just 11 days after receiving his new liver.

The entire process took around 18 hours from the organ first being retrieved to completion of the transplant operation. It involved a team of around a dozen staff led by consultant liver transplant surgeons Mr Thamara Perera.

The surgeon said: “There has been recent interest within the liver transplant community about the use of various machine devices to ‘pump blood’ at body temperature into organs retrieved from donors because it has been shown to minimise the damage which is inevitable when organs are preserved in cold storage.

“Many options and different combinations of techniques are proposed and currently under investigation in various clinical studies and trials.

“Several centres in the world are currently investigating the possibility of this type of warm resuscitation at the end of cold storage. However this was the first successful transplant.”

The machine, which also contains an oxygenator, works by constantly pumping blood at body temperature into the liver through two blood vessels in the organ.