Retrospective Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2025. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Transplant. Jun 18, 2025; 15(2): 99170
Published online Jun 18, 2025. doi: 10.5500/wjt.v15.i2.99170
Upper limit of normothermic machine preservation of liver grafts from donation after circulatory death yet to be defined
William H Archie, Maria Baimas-George, Nathanael Haynes, Souma Kundu, Katheryn Peterson, Chase J Wehrle, Damien Huckleberry, Lon Eskind, David Levi, Jose R Soto, Roger Denny, Vincent Casingal, Allyson Cochran, Erin H Rein, Dionisios Vrochides
William H Archie, Maria Baimas-George, Nathanael Haynes, Souma Kundu, Katheryn Peterson, Damien Huckleberry, Lon Eskind, David Levi, Jose R Soto, Roger Denny, Vincent Casingal, Erin H Rein, Dionisios Vrochides, Division of Adominal Transplant, Department of Surgery, Carolinas Medical Center, Charlotte, NC 28203, United States
Chase J Wehrle, Department of Hepato-Pancreato-Biliary/Liver Transplant Surgery, Cleveland Clinic Transplant Research Center, Cleveland, OH 44195, United States
Allyson Cochran, Department of Surgery, Carolinas Center for Surgical Outcomes Science, Carolinas Medical Center, Charlotte, NC 28203, United States
Author contributions: Archie WH, Baimas-George M, Haynes N and Kundu S assisted with literature review and manuscript writing; Peterson K assisted with data abstraction and analysis; Wehrle CJ assisted with study design and data analysis; Huckleberry D, Eskind L, Levi D, Soto JR, Denny R, Casingal V, and Rein EH assisted with data collection, particularly perfusion parameters and donor information; Cochran A performed statistical analysis of all collected data; Vrochides D was the principal investigator assisting in project design, data interpretation and final manuscript writing; all of the authors read and approved the final version of the manuscript to be published.
Institutional review board statement: This project was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB00097121).
Informed consent statement: Full waiver of consent was obtained.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All authors declare no conflict of interest in publishing the manuscript.
Data sharing statement: Our data contains protected health information. Deidentified data can be made available upon request.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: William H Archie, MD, Doctor, Division of Adominal Transplant, Department of Surgery, Carolinas Medical Center, 1000 Blythe Blvd, Charlotte, NC 28203, United States. william.archie@atriumhealth.org
Received: July 15, 2024
Revised: November 7, 2024
Accepted: December 11, 2024
Published online: June 18, 2025
Processing time: 220 Days and 20 Hours
Core Tip

Core Tip: We performed a retrospective study of the first 50 liver transplants at a single-center tertiary institution to determine if there was any observed relationship between machine perfusion time (MPT) and post-transplant graft function for liver grafts from donation after circulatory death (DCD) and found there to be none despite MPT ranging from six up to 24 hours. This leads us to conclude that the pump itself, not duration, provides the benefit to the graft and that we have yet to determine the upper time limit for maintaining DCD livers on pump, if one exists.