Preclinical Foundation for Normothermic Machine Liver Preservation

Abstract

Liver transplantation is the primary treatment for end-stage liver disease, but demand exceeds supply due to the shortage of available healthy donor grafts. To increase the supply of useable grafts for transplantation, innovative and better preservation methods are needed to enable the use of livers from extended criteria donors. Normothermic machine perfusion (NMP) has been extensively studied in the laboratory and holds great potential for expanding the donor pool. This review summarizes the progress that has been made in NMP over the last two decades, with emphasis on the recent studies preparing the method for clinical trials.