How a human lung is kept alive and breathing for a transplant
Lung in a box. Very cool.
To extend the time an organ can last before it’s transplanted into a recipient, engineers have developed the Organ Care System — which is essentially a box pumping blood and oxygen to the lung.
As Gizmodo explains:
What’s especially neat about the OCS is that they can actually be used to improve imperfect donor lungs by flushing it with antibiotics and nutrients. Like refurbishing a lung, sort of. Putting donor lungs through the OCS helps increase and improve the number of potential donor lungs. Not every donor lung is usable, donor lungs that go through the OCS may be.