'Heart in a Box': Breakthrough to Make Dead Hearts Alive For Transplant

A new miracle "heart in a box" can again animate hearts taken from dead people, and transplanted to others.

Surgeons in the U.K. and Australia used it in 15 cases, even as they waited for "regulatory approval" in the U.S., MIT Technology Review reported.

While this was developed by Transmedics, an Andover, Massachusetts-based company, it is an important step ahead in the medical field, which usually relies on donations from brain-dead patients for heart transplants that work.

Normally, after a person dies, hearts removed from them look "too damaged". But only with the new device and "reanimation of non-beating hearts", the transplant operations could go up by 25 percent, which would save a lot more lives, The Telegraph noted.

It operates on wheels. The 'heart in a box' has a tubing system, an oxygen supply and a sterile chamber that are all attached to the heart and keep on supplying blood, nutrients and electrolytes to the heart. This technology helps us to store and transport donated organs.

Usually, eight out of 10 hearts being transported never reach on time, so they get wasted, according to Al Jazeera.

"A human organ has never been kept alive outside of a human body until this machine became a clinical reality. It makes intuitive sense to a layperson to say, "Instead of having my heart on ice, I want it to be warm. I want it to be beating," said Dr. Abbas Ardehali, of UCLA's heart and lung transplant program, in the report.

However, the new technology costs $250,000, which is too expensive for it to be distributed.

Transmedics is planning to use the technology for other vital organs too, according to hngn.