Organ Reengineering Group

The Organ Reengineering Group at the Center for Engineering in Medicine & Surgery is working to develop new applications to increase the viability of transplantable organs.

Organ transplantation remains the only solution to many diseases, including organ failure. Approximately 120,000 patients are currently on the organ waiting list in the U.S. alone. Most will perish while waiting for a donor organ.

Despite the apparent shortage, the number of donors available for organ recovery is in the hundreds of thousands. The problem is that most of these organs are suboptimal, and without treatment must be precluded from transplantation.

Our group aims to develop novel approaches to render these organs transplantable and ultimately eliminate the donor organ shortage. Our research focuses on the development of an organ revitalization platform, the basis of which is extracorporeal machine perfusion enabling multiple dynamic preservation modalities.

Ongoing research projects:

• Revitalization and transplantation of cadaveric (1hr warm ischemic) rat, pig, and eventually human livers after recovery with room temperature perfusion
• Machine perfusion of organs that are extensively injured beyond recovery for transplantation in order to enhance the recovery of cells from organs
• Subzero nonfreezing (supercooling) for extended storage durations, with the intent to ultimately bank organs
• New perfusion methods to decellularize non-salvageable cadaveric organs to create whole-organ scaffolds for tissue engineering

Affiliated Faculty

• Korkut Uygun, PhD
• Basak Uygun, PhD
• Marianna Bei, PhD
• Martin Yarmush, MD, PhD
• Mehmet Toner, PhD
• Shannon N. Tessier, PhD

Representative Publications

1. Uygun, Basak E., Martin L. Yarmush, and Korkut Uygun. "Application of whole-organ tissue engineering in hepatology." Nature Reviews Gastroenterology and Hepatology 9.12 (2012): 738-744.
2. Izamis, Maria-Louisa, Tim Berendsen, Korkut Uygun, and Martin Yarmush. "Addressing the donor liver shortage with ex vivo machine perfusion." Journal of Healthcare Engineering 3, no. 2 (2012): 279-298.
3. Tolboom, Herman, Maria-Louisa Izamis, Nripen Sharma, Jack M. Milwid, Basak Uygun, François Berthiaume, Korkut Uygun, and Martin L. Yarmush. "Subnormothermic machine perfusion at both 20 C and 30 C recovers ischemic rat livers for successful transplantation." Journal of Surgical Research 175, no. 1 (2012): 149-156.
4. Izamis, Maria-Louisa, Herman Tolboom, Basak Uygun, Francois Berthiaume, Martin L. Yarmush, and Korkut Uygun. "Resuscitation of ischemic donor livers with normothermic machine perfusion: a metabolic flux analysis of treatment in rats." PloS one 8, no. 7 (2013): e69758.
5. Uygun, Basak E., and Martin L. Yarmush. "Engineered liver for transplantation." Current opinion in biotechnology 24.5 (2013): 893-899.
6. Izamis, Maria-Louisa, Candice Calhoun, Basak E. Uygun, Maria Angela Guzzardi, Gavrielle Price, Martha Luitje, Nima Saeidi, Martin L. Yarmush, and Korkut Uygun. "Simple machine perfusion significantly enhances hepatocyte yields of ischemic and fresh rat livers." Cell Medicine 4, no. 3 (2013): 109.
7. Bruinsma, Bote G., Martin L. Yarmush, and Korkut Uygun. "Organomatics and organometrics: Novel platforms for long-term whole-organ culture." Technology2.01 (2014): 13-22.
8. Bruinsma, Bote G., James H. Avruch, Pepijn D. Weeder, Gautham V. Sridharan, Basak E. Uygun, Negin G. Karimian, Robert J. Porte, James F. Markmann, Heidi Yeh, and Korkut Uygun. "Functional Human Liver Preservation and Recovery by Means of Subnormothermic Machine Perfusion."Journal of visualized experiments: JoVE 98 (2015).