February is American Heart Month, an opportunity to raise awareness about the health impacts of heart disease and to spotlight the innovative ways that Mass General researchers are working to tackle these challenges.
When a donor organ becomes available, it is often a race against time to match that organ to a transplant patient, and to get both the patient and the organ to the same operating theater so surgery can take place while the organ is still viable.
Preserving donor organs in a state of cold-induced suspended animation would increase their shelf life and allow for better matching between donors and recipients. But freezing the organ outright causes too much damage, rendering it unsuitable for transplant.
Shannon Tessier, PhD, an assistant investigator at Mass General’s Center for Engineering in Medicine & Surgery and an assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, is looking to nature for solutions, drawing inspiration from strategies that animals such as wood frogs use to survive in extreme cold. Learn more about her efforts to increase the preservation time of donor hearts in this Q&A below.
What Key Heart-Related Research Question Are You Investigating Right Now?
There are currently over 123,000 patients on the organ transplant waiting list in the US, a number that far exceeds the supply of available organs, and that continues to grow by approximately five percent each year.
A major reason is the limitations of our current organ handling and transportation practices, which causes severe logistical constraints and disallows the transplantation of marginally injured organs.
My research aims to develop protocol to safely bank donor hearts for several weeks to enable global organ matching and make hearts more tolerant to stressors experienced prior to transplantation to increase the donor pool of hearts.
What is Unique About Your Approach?
Firstly, we always look to nature for inspiration. More specifically, the ability to descend into a state of “suspended animation,” characterized by the slowing of life processes and improved stress tolerance, holds promise. Currently, I am exploring two methods of suspended animation; 1) freeze-tolerance, and 2) high-temperature hibernation.
The second unique feature of our work is introducing the zebrafish as a novel model system for organ transplantation research. While zebrafish has become a favored research animal for studying human disease, it has never been used as a tool to develop innovative approaches for organ handling and preservation, or to understand the underlying biology of organ transplantation.
What Do You Love About Studying the Heart?
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States and it has such a tremendous impact on all of us. In contrast to other illnesses, a cure to end-stage heart failure actually exists—a heart transplant—but it’s just not accessible to everyone.
If we can improve access to this life-saving procedure, many more lives could be saved.
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Massachusetts General Hospital is home to the largest hospital-based research program in the United States. Our researchers work side-by-side with physicians to develop innovative new ways to diagnose, treat and prevent disease.
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