The average organ donation lasts just 24 hours

In the US alone there are 26,000 people who undergo transplants. Every one of those operations has to be scheduled and completed in under 24 hours.

Our work creates opportunities for better organ matching, potential organ rehabilitation and augmentation, and potential new treatments like immune tolerance induction to reduce rejection.

24 hours

 

900,000

 

More than 900,000 deaths every year in the US could be prevented by transplantation

But only if organ supply constraints are removed. This staggering number of preventable deaths is even larger if you look at the population of the globe.

What needs to be done?

With your help, the Organ Preservation Alliance helps develop new ways to preserve organs and save lives.

Tissue Preservation is the

#1

roadblock in cancer genomics.

The National Cancer Institute identified tissue preservation as perhaps the number one roadblock in cancer genomics and numerous other areas.

But preservation doesn’t affect just cancer.

Every day a massive amount of human tissue is discarded because it cannot be used in a timely way. Yet simultaneously it is routine for researchers to plan entire studies around the limited availability of quality tissue samples. This tissue shortage constrains experimental design which threatens data quality, adds waste and adds cost to research.

More than 4,000 healthy organs were discarded in 2012.

Tissue preservation also bottlenecks bioengineering, according to over a dozen US federal science agencies. Without a shelf-life, bioengineered tissues have constrained uses; with a shelf life, on-demand uses, inventories, worldwide distribution become possible.

 

The shortage of human tissues, caused by the inability to preserve them, severely constrains drug discovery. It adds cost. It adds time. And it adds error.

New molecules must be tested in animal models and then tested in humans, instead of using human tissue model and primary cells from the beginning. And no doubt there are molecules that fail in animal models but would be successful in humans.