Grant: Collaborative Health Research Projects

When an organ, such as the kidney, heart and liver, does not work anymore, a doctor will consider organ transplantation to save the patients life. Organ transplantation is 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 no blood supply. One technique to limit this damage is to preserve the organ in a cold preservation solution. Several different cold preservations are currently used in the organ transplantation with varying degrees of success, but none of them appears perfect because the damage is still so big, many of transplants do not work after transplantation. Also because of poor prevention of donor organ damage by these solutions, less ideal organs, such as from those donors age greater than 55 years, could not be acceptable for transplantation. This problem not only increases the cost of health care of these transplant patients and affects the survival of the implanted organ afterwards because of transplant damage, but also decreases the use of donor organs worsening the shortage of donor organs. Our objective in this project is to develop a new cold preservation solution based on a novel chemical (called polyglycerol polymer) that will give the best protection of the organ from damage during cold preservation or transplantation. We finished preliminary study for this project, but need financial support from CIHR/NSERC to understand how it works, and further prove the beneficial effects of our novel solution on cold preservation of the organs in all different preclinical models before we are allowed to test it in the hospital.