AN ORGAN preservation medium, recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration for clinical use in the United States, is making liver transplantation a more leisurely procedure, according to several reports at the recent meeting of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons in Chicago, Ill.
The University of Wisconsin (UW) cold storage solution, developed by surgeon Folkert O. Belzer, MD, and biochemist James Southard, PhD, contains a combination of metabolic and preservative agents concocted by the two over a period of several years. It has been licensed by the university to E.I DuPont de Nemours & Company, Wilmington, Del, and is marketed under the trade name ViaSpan.
The solution has been evaluated in clinical trials in the United States and Europe since 1986, which, almost uniformly, have demonstrated that it has doubled the cold storage time for harvested livers. More recently, studies have been directed at establishing whether organs stored