Now there is a machine that can do what Poe imagined - preserve a beating heart in isolation. And while it might seem that the idea of coming yuckiest down the pike in a long time, it really represents a bold and exciting step forward to try to save the lives of people with no hearts.
The "heart in a box" machine, known as the Organ Care System, is made by TransMedics, Inc., Andover, Mass. Doctors in Pittsburgh recently announced that the machine is used to keep the heart beating for hours on their own after being removed from corpses. Three patients, a 47-year-old and two women aged 50 years, received the hearts and all seem to be doing very well.
The machine will be tested further in the next year at five transplant centers in the U.S. - University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, the University of Chicago Hospitals Center and Cleveland Clinic heart. The researchers want to be sure that hearts transplanted out of the box really work as well as those preserved by current methods.
Until now, when a heart was donated to someone's death, the body was saturated with preservative fluid and hidden in a thermos-type cooler filled with ice. We've all seen pictures of people in white coats running to or from airplanes, cooler in hand, racing against the clock to get an organ to someone in desperate need.
Within the new transportable box, a machine pumps blood through the heart donors without liquid cold temperatures or artificial preservatives. The company says that a heart was still functioning in this way can be preserved for at least 24 hours.
If this machine manages to keep hearts beating safely in more trials, then instead of the current six hours limit current techniques enable conservation, the heart may be moved anywhere in the country where someone needed without having to worry about how long the process takes. And some hearts that can not be strong enough to last with current techniques could be recovered and transplanted with this new technology.
