The Mount Sinai Health System’s Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute in New York City has received a five-year, $5 million gift from the Blavatnik Family Foundation.

The funding will support the expansion and implementation of a novel technology, called normothermic machine perfusion, which can extend the life of donated organs and salvage organs that might previously have been deemed unusable. The technology enables donor organs to be pumped with blood and oxygen at normal body temperatures, instead of being maintained in the more common way, in cold storage with ice.

The gift will support the research of Leona Kim-Schluger, associate director of the Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute, and enable collaborations with other scientists at Mount Sinai to further explore additional opportunities for organ machine perfusion in cancer research. The first installment of the gift will go toward establishing a vital international organ registry to provide a framework for advancing perfusion efforts, including the use of artificial intelligence to better understand and predict organ viability and quality.

“Machine preservation of organs is a potentially seismic change in the field of transplantation. The perfusion platform has the potential to dramatically increase patient access to life-saving organ transplantation,” said Kim-Schluger. “Not only might we be able to resuscitate suboptimal donor organs, but we can potentially re-engineer them in the future.”

(Photo credit: Getty Images/sturti)