Prolonged normothermic perfusion: a promising approach to kidney transplantation

In the May 17th issue of Nature Communications, Richard Dumbill and colleagues from Oxford, Coventry, and Innsbruck reported a single-center Phase 1 study involving 36 patients who received deceased donor kidney transplants (44% DCD).These kidneys were maintained on normothermic machine perfusion (NMP) for a median duration of approximately six hours (range 2.2-23.4)(1).The control group consisted of historical transplants (n = 72), which were matched 2:1 based on four variables-donor type, the 2019 UK Kidney Donor Risk Index, induction immunosuppression, and the cold ischemic time (CIT) prior to NMP.The primary outcome was death-censored graft survival at one month.The secondary objectives included ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI) severity determined by biomarkers at two hours (such as NGAL, GST-Pi, LDH, L-FABP, and IL-18), as well as vascular resistance and the technical performance of the perfusion device.