Dr. Shaf Keshavjee presents EXVIVO Lung Perfusion system at TEDMED

TEDMED is one of the most prestigious annual events where leaders in the medical field discuss their ideas and I'm pleased to see that Dr. Shaf Keshavjee was an invited speaker. The first speaker of the event, he followed double-lung transplant recipient soprano Charity Tillemann-Dick's opening song “I Could Have Danced All Night” Dr. Keshavjee is my lung transplant surgeon and it's been my privilege to see the development of the Toronto EXVIVO Lung Perfusion System from it's early beginnings. Click here for a video of the system.

TEDMED celebrates conversations that demonstrate the intersection and connections between all things medical and healthcare related: from personal health to public health, devices to design and Hollywood to the hospital. TMED was held Oct 26-29 in San Diego.

By Katherine Hobson The Wall Street Journal Blogs

Last night at view video, Shaf Keshavjee, director of the Toronto Lung Transplant Program, asked for volunteers to come onstage and touch a breathing pig lung, which was hooked up to a machine that kept it essentially “alive.”

Martha Stewart, seated up front, raised her hand, so minutes later she — and a handful of other conference participants — had donned rubber gloves and were grasping the lung as the machine helped it “breathe.” (We halfway expected her to offer up a really good offal recipe to the crowd.)

The tool Keshavjee had brought with him was essentially a mini heart-lung machine but in reverse. It permits the lung to stay at room temperature and function as usual — removing carbon dioxide from blood (a cellular solution, in this demonstration) and adding oxygen. When a human lung retrieved from a deceased donor is hooked up to the machine, physicians get the luxury of time to assess its condition and then treat it using targeted methods, including gene and cellular therapy, before transplanting it into the recipient. At that point, it’s become a “super organ,” as Keshavjee says.

Using conventional methods, transplanted lungs are cooled to slow deterioration and then transplanted, with little time to assess their condition or repair damage. Keshavjee says this new method has allowed some 30 patients to receive donated and repaired lungs that wouldn’t have ordinarily been used.

He says the holy grail for the pre-op repair process would be to treat donated lungs while they’re outside the body to avoid rejection by the host, to “make it like self.”

More from TEDMED:
pagingdrgupta.blogs.cnn.com

Katherine Hobson on double-lung transplant recipient soprano Charity Tillemann-Dick's opening song “I Could Have Danced All Night”

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