The amazing story of how a cooler and app have transformed organ transplants – Digital Trends
Source: Digital Trends
“Ice is very bad for organ storage. It is very good to cool your beers in the summer, but it has no place in organ transplantation,” Lisa Anderson, CEO of Paragonix Technologies joked during an otherwise serious conversation that began as a quick chat about a new app, but ended up as an incredible story about how an established-but-flawed way of transporting donated organs to a recipient has been turned on its head.
“ For about 50 years, transplanted organs have been moved around on ice,” Anderson explained. “They were put in a sterile plastic bag and placed into an ice chest filled with crushed ice. But this is too cold for organs. It’s freezing. If you put a piece of meat in the freezer it gets freezer burn, which injures tissue and organs. Just because clinicians have been doing this for 50 years, doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do.”
Paragonix recognized organ storage temperature couldn’t be too cold, and they were persevered more effectively between four-and-eight degrees celsius. It now produces a range of high-tech storage devices that cool, preserve, and even track the “health” of the organ it contains, along with a master app to simplify, streamline, and speed up the crucial flow of information throughout its journey.
The FDA-approved devices, which are quite different to the ones you’d use to keep drinks cold at a barbecue, are made of a single-use, biodegradable foam with Paragonix’s SherpaCool phase-change technology to maintain a steady thermal environment inside. A battery keeps the display running, but the cooling is passive, so if the battery runs out for some reason, the contents will not be affected.
Depending on the organ being transported, the Paragonix cooler performs other functions too, as Anderson explained:
“ Some of our devices focus purely on temperature control, but some have other functionalities. For kidneys it’s actually perfusing [meaning a liquid is circulating through an organ] the kidney during transport with a nutrient rich solution, and we can capture data to show how the organ is responding to it. This has been correlated to function after transplant, and we can give the clinician an indication of the health of that organ on arrival. Lungs are transported in an inflated state and we can track the inflation pressure during transport, another important parameter for clinicians.”
Anderson explained much of tracking data simply didn’t exist for organs in transit before, and could only be provided by machines and then verbally communicated to clinicians. Understanding the condition of the organ, and keeping people informed during its journey, is where the app comes in.
“ A transplant procedure involves many, many people,” Anderson continued. “The team taking care of the recipient has to be in the know, but so does the donor hospital. Before, what happened was hundreds of phone calls between people were constantly taking place, exchanging chemical information, information about their location, information about what they were doing, and what they were experiencing. In the Paragonix mobile app, everybody can see what is happening on the journey, whether donation has taken place, whether the organ has been recovered, and where the organ is. It has insights, remote monitoring, and real-time information so everyone knows what’s happening.”
Putting an organ in a bag filled with ice and communicating over over the phone suddenly sounds like a very outdated way of doing things. Anderson’s enthusiasm was obvious during our conversation, but at its most infectious when she started explaining how Paragonix’s technology was saving, and then extending people’s lives.
“ From inception to date we’ve transported over 10,000 organs and the app was has been used in over 6,000 cases,” she told Digital Trends. “We’re following close to 5,000 patients and what we have shown is if you put an organ in a Paragonix device you’re going to significantly reduce, by over 50%, the occurrence of severe complications after transplant. Over four years we’ve been able to demonstrate there are more patients alive because of our technology than with ice, and a reduction in [heart transplant] mortality by 45%. We’re the only company that not only has devices for all five transplant organs, but also for pediatric transplants. No other company has pediatric utilization.”
It’s hard not to be impressed and excited about technology with such meaningful benefits, but Paragonix has also completely changed the logistics of getting an organ to the right person, and dramatically reduced the costs involved too.
We’ve transported over 10,000 organs and the app was has been used in over 6,000 cases,
“ Before the introduction of advanced preservation technology such as ours, organs had to be sourced within about 290 square miles,” Anderson told me. “This was a pretty narrow geographic area, especially if you are on the coast and half of your territory was in the ocean. We have been able to push this geographic dista
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