Engineering news
OrganOx was named winner of the prestigious MacRobert Award at the Royal Academy of Engineering awards in London on Tuesday (8 July), with the team receiving a gold medal and a prize of £50,000 from science minister Lord Vallance.
“The University of Oxford spin-out has developed two of the most complex medical devices ever designed and built in the UK,” a Royal Academy announcement said. By maintaining livers and kidneys in a functioning state for longer, the devices are “dramatically increasing the number of transplants for patients, eradicating night-time operations for clinicians and reducing overall healthcare costs for providers,” it continued.
“A third, patient-connected device can also be used to provide ‘liver dialysis’ using either a human or porcine organ outside the body, to help patients in liver failure to recover without the need for a transplant.”
Operating at 37ºC, the devices replicate the physiological conditions of an organ within the body by perfusing it with a red-cell suspension reconstituted from donor blood of the same blood type. This allows fully automated, operator-independent preservation of an organ in a functioning state outside the body for up to 24 hours clinically and for several days for research and testing.
The technology, which was initially designed to preserve livers, has enabled over 6,000 transplants across four continents and 12 countries. Medical facilities adopting the technology have reported up to a 30% net increase in transplants, with waiting times and waiting list mortality cut by more than half.
With hydraulic, pneumatic and haemodynamic sub-systems and remote-access capabilities, both devices can be used safely in operating theatres, during transport by road or in flight, or when directly connected to a patient when providing liver support outside the body.
Chief technology officer Professor Constantin Coussios OBE, who co-founded OrganOx with liver transplant surgeon Professor Peter Friend, said: “Biology teaches engineers a lesson in humility. The liver and kidney represent two of the most non-linear and multivariate systems to attempt to control and emulate, but the reward for eventually doing so successfully after two decades of effort is immense.
“Each quality-assured organ that has functioned effectively in our devices outside the body saves the life of a patient, over 6,000 to date, and gives that patients and their loved ones the gift of time and a quality of life previously thought irreclaimable. This achievement, and the many more to come, would not have been possible without the academic, technological and translational excellence of the UK innovation ecosystem.”
Chair of the MacRobert Award judging panel, Dr Alison Vincent CBE, said: “Despite facing stiff competition from our other two finalists, Synthesia and Microsoft Azure Fibre, OrganOx is a worthy winner of the MacRobert Award, which has been celebrating the strength, creativity and global impact of British engineering for more than half a century. OrganOx has developed a truly game-changing and life-saving innovation that is at the forefront of efforts to increase the number of donor organs available for transplantation.”
The MacRobert Award has recognised “transformative UK engineering that also demonstrates commerciality and societal benefit” for more than 55 years. Other medical winners include EMI’s CT scanner in 1972 and Touch Bionics in 2008 with the world’s first bionic hand.
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