Brendan Parent
New York University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
More than 7,300 people with heart failure are on the US transplant waiting list. In 2022, only 35% received a heart, and hundreds died or became too sick to remain eligible.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Social Science
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
organ donation
organ transplantation
heart transplantation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2029
What they work on
- 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).
- Assess how donor families and the US public judge the ethics of NRP, which restarts circulation inside the donor's body after death is declared, using focus groups with donor families and a national survey.
- Determine whether NRP could put public trust in US organ transplantation at risk, given concerns that restarting circulation conflicts with the Dead Donor Rule and the legal definition of death.
- Use the Delphi method, repeated rounds of expert rating and feedback that build consensus, to develop and share ethics guidelines for explaining NRP to families asked to authorize donation.
More about the research
Hearts from donors who die after their circulation stops, called donation after circulatory death (DCD), could raise heart availability by up to 30%. However, these organs are injured during the time they go without blood flow. One fix is normothermic regional perfusion (NRP). NRP uses extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, a machine that pumps and oxygenates blood outside the body, to restart warm circulation inside the donor so organs can be protected and evaluated. But NRP also restarts the heartbeat. Some argue this undermines the declaration of death and may violate the Dead Donor Rule, the principle that donors must be dead before life-sustaining organs are removed. These concerns could threaten public trust in organ transplantation.
Why it matters
More than 100,000 people in the US with end-stage organ failure are waiting for transplants. NRP could greatly increase the number of high-quality hearts and other organs available to them. Evidence on how families and the public view NRP, combined with expert ethics guidelines, could help transplant programs and organ procurement organizations decide whether to adopt it. It could also guide how they talk with donor families in ways that protect trust in organ donation.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Marian Urban
University of Nebraska Medical Center, NE·Medicine & Clinical Research
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.
Hosam Fathy
University of Maryland, MD·Biomedical Engineering
Develop a multi-functional fiber-optic sensor that measures dissolved oxygen and carbon dioxide, temperature and pressure in perfluorocarbon liquid circulated through the abdomen.
Zhongjun Wu
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Biomedical Engineering
Characterize how high mechanical shear stress changes neutrophil structure, rolling and adhesion, and surface markers, and quantify how structural damage scales with stress levels found in VADs and ECMO.
The school
New York University: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 540 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.