Marian Urban
University of Nebraska Medical Center, NE·Medicine & Clinical Research
Far more people need a new heart than there are donor hearts available. One way to widen the supply is donation after circulatory death (DCD), where organs come from donors whose heart and breathing have stopped, rather than from brain-dead donors kept on life support.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physiology
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
heart transplantation
donation after circulatory death
organ preservation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2028
What they work on
- Test whether perfusing a donor heart first with a cardioprotective solution, rather than fully oxygenated blood, improves heart function after in-situ reanimation, measured by echocardiography and blood-flow and pressure readings in a pig model.
- Compare structural damage to heart muscle between hearts restarted with oxygenated blood and hearts given cardioprotective solution, using blood and tissue analyses in a porcine model of low-oxygen circulatory arrest.
- Develop an optimal in-body (in-situ) technique for reviving and preserving organs from donation after circulatory death, using a new pig model of low-oxygen cardiac arrest.
More about the research
The catch is that DCD organs go without oxygen for a while before they are recovered, which makes it harder to keep them healthy enough to transplant.
Why it matters
The supply of donor hearts falls well short of the number of patients on transplant waitlists. A better way to protect hearts recovered after circulatory death could make more of these organs usable. The team anticipates that bringing the technique into clinical practice could raise heart transplant activity in its region by about 20%, helping patients waiting for a new heart.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Brendan Parent
New York University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Survey and interview staff from all 56 US Organ Procurement Organizations to document how they request family authorization for organ donation involving normothermic regional perfusion (NRP).
Radhika Muzumdar
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Physiology
Determine how effectively humanin, a small peptide encoded in mitochondria, protects the heart in mouse models of myocardial ischemia-reperfusion injury and ischemia-induced heart failure in aging, measuring infarct size and cardiac function.
Pablo Sanchez
University of Chicago, IL·Biomedical Engineering
Test whether the liver function of a whole pig, connected to donor lungs by cross-circulation, explains the improved lung recovery seen during ex vivo lung perfusion (EVLP), in which lungs are kept warm and ventilated outside the body.
The school
University of Nebraska Medical Center: 20 labs on PI Pages, $657M a year on research, 82 research doctorates a year.
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