Grant: Proof of Principle Program - Phase I

Organ transplantation is a life-saving treatment option that involves a surgical procedure that consists of removing an organ from one body and implanting it to another; however, damage to the organ occurs in this process due to blood supply disruption. One technique to limit this damage is to preserve the organ in a cold preservation solution. Several different cold preservation solutions are currently used, but none of them appears perfect because the damage associated with storage prior to transplantation is still so big, and so many of transplants do not work or function well after transplantation. This problem increases the cost of health care of these transplant patients, and affects the survival of the implanted organ afterward. And also because of this problem, many of less-than-"ideal" donor organs, such as, from non-heart beating donors or donor age over 55 years, are not used or accepted for transplantation although many people outside the clinic are waiting for a life-saving organ transplant. Our objective in this project is to develop new preservation solutions based on a new material - polymer. This polymer is expected to give the best protection of the donor organ from damage during the cold preservation before transplantation, which increases the life of the transplanted organ as well as allows us to use those "discarded" organs for transplantation. Our pilot studies show that the polymer based preservation solution protects the organs superior to any current methods available. In this study, we will perform detailed studies to optimize the properties of polymer to enhance the organ protection, and will further evaluate the beneficial effects of our novel solutions on cold preservation of the kidney organs in different preclinical models before we are allowed to test them in the hospital. We anticipate that that this will have significant impact on increasing the donor pool and can translate to significant savings to Canadian health care system.