# Development of a liver viability index for transplantation

> **NIH NIH R01** · MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL · 2022 · $379,125

## Abstract

ABSTRACT
Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis causes up 60,000 deaths annually in the US, over 4,000 of which are
directly due to lack of a donor liver available for transplant. These numbers could be reduced dramatically
should the donor organ pool be expanded by rendering marginal cases, such as Donors obtained after Cardiac
Death (DCD), transplantable. It is estimated that about 6,000 cadaveric livers/yr are only marginally damaged
by ischemia post-cardiac death and could be resuscitated for transplantation. There is evidence from our lab
and others that machine perfusion is a very promising approach for recovering cadaveric organs that would be
otherwise rejected from the donor pool. However, safe and effective clinical realization of such a machine
perfusion device requires sophisticated algorithms that ensure tight control of the system, maximize the
viability of the organ and accurately assess if the liver is ready for transplantation at the end of perfusion. There
is a significant gap of methods and algorithms designed for assessing organ viability for transplantation in a
quantitative and objective manner, which is a major bottleneck in clinical translation of marginal organ recovery
technologies and vertical advancement of the field.
 Our long-term goal is to maximize the use of donor organs while ensuring the graft success upon
transplant. The objective of the proposed study is to develop and test a dynamic, online method to assess liver
transplant success in a small clinical study. The central hypothesis to be tested here is that the liver survival
post-transplantation is correlated to its energy state and energy metabolism during machine perfusion.
 The work described here is expected to create a dynamic, on-line liver viability score which can be used to
assess the condition of the donor organs prior to transplantation surgery, ultimately reducing the guesswork
involved in transplantation and consequently increasing the use of marginal donor organs reducing deaths due
to graft failure. This development is anticipated to increase the pace of clinical adoption of machine perfusion
preservation studies for the liver, as well as other organs. The results of this work will also have a positive
impact on engineering science by establishing the basis for integration of process design & control of these
complex, dynamic organ preservation systems.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10436293
- **Project number:** 5R01DK096075-10
- **Recipient organization:** MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL
- **Principal Investigator:** Korkut Uygun
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $379,125
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2012-08-01 → 2024-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10436293

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10436293, Development of a liver viability index for transplantation (5R01DK096075-10). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10436293. Licensed CC0.

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