There has been a new world first in the realm of human heart transplant surgery after the donor heart was successfully transported across the Atlantic Ocean on a long-haul commercial flight.
The donor heart was preserved for over 12 hours before being transplanted into a 70-year-old man at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in France, according to researchers who recently published their findings in the Lancet medical journal.
Authors Guillaume Lebreton and Pascal Leprince noted that transporting a human heart more than 6,750 km from the French West Indies to Paris “was a feat previously unimaginable in organ transplantation”.
The achievement was made possible by a special transport case that not only keeps the heart cool but also keeps the organ oxygenated throughout its long-haul journey.
Doctors who arranged for the heart to be transported from the French West Indies to Paris booked coach seats for the XVIVO Heart Assist Transport module. Despite encountering severe turbulence, the flight was ‘uneventful’.
“In recent years, the concept of using a machine to continuously pump an oxygenated fluid through the heart during transport has been under evaluation in clinical trials,” Lebreton and Leprince explained.
“No studies have, however, explored extreme transport times (over ten hours)”.
“This transplant may be a monumental breakthrough in heart transplantation allowing for increased access to unused donor hearts, that now can be utilized and safely transported across vast distances,” commented Lebreton.
