
Ms Gribilas was suffering from heart failure due to an inherited cardiomyopathy. The donor’s heart had stopped beating 20 minutes before it was retrieved. Michelle Gribilas from Sydney, was the first person to ever receive a heart transplant from a DCD donor in August 2014. The additional challenge posed by the DCD heart is that it is non-beating at the point of retrieval so the team needed to develop a technique that allowed them to not only to preserve the heart but also which allowed them to confirm that the heart was viable and would work when transplanted. But when DCD donors began to be used more widely for kidney, liver and lung transplantation, Professor Macdonald started to explore the possibility of retrieving and transplanting hearts from DCD donors.

The initial focus of this research was to improve the quality of donor hearts from brain dead donors. The first DCD heart transplant was performed in 2014 – the culmination of 20 years research in donor heart preservation in the Institute’s lab. The preservation solution took 12 years to perfect.Improves heart function when it is restarted.Reduces the number of heart muscle cells that die.Makes the heart more resilient to transplantation.Reduces the amount of damage to the heart.The unique Preservation Solution that was developed by the Institute: This means donor hearts can be transported further and so be better matched with a recipient, improving the outcomes for patients, and dramatically expanding the available pool of heart donors. This new approach extends the amount of time a donor transplant heart can spend in transit from four to 14 hours. The use of DCD hearts, where the heart is no longer beating, represents a paradigm shift in organ donation. Until Heart in a Box was invented, transplant units relied solely on donor hearts from brain-dead patients whose hearts are still beating.
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Once housed inside the portable device, the heart is reanimated, preserved with the fluid developed in the Institute’s laboratory where it can be functionally assessed until it is ready to be placed inside the recipient. The donor heart is first connected to a sterile circuit where it is kept beating and warm thereby limiting the detrimental effects of cold ischaemia (a period where the heart is dormant without oxygen and nutrients) that occurs with the standard organ preservation mode of packing the heart on ice in an Esky. The use of Donation after Cardiac Death (DCD) hearts, where the heart is no longer beating, represents a paradigm shift in organ donation.


This was done by using a defined preservation fluid developed in the laboratory and a machine that allows the heart to beat outside the body known as ‘Heart in a Box’.
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In a world first that has already directly saved hundreds of lives, Professor Peter MacDonald and his research team at the Cardiac Transplantation Laboratory at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute discovered how to transplant donor hearts that had stopped beating after death.
