Doctors in Switzerland have successfully removed a cancer patient’s damaged liver before transplanting it back into their body having treated the organ in a machine for three days.
The multidisciplinary Liver4Life team at the University Hospital Zurich (USZ) has claimed that the procedure is the first of its kind in the world and they credited their in-house perfusion machine with making the feat possible.
The USZ said in a statement on Tuesday, May 31: “The multidisciplinary Zurich research team Liver4Life has succeeded in doing something during a treatment attempt that had never been achieved in the history of medicine until now: it treated an originally damaged human liver in a machine for three days outside of a body and then implanted the recovered organ into a cancer patient.”
