Quebec man receives North America’s 1st transplant using regenerated liver technology

A 64-year-old Quebec man has become the first patient in North America to receive a regenerated liver thanks to a breakthrough technology that could make dozens of additional livers available for transplant in its first year alone.

Gérard Landry, a resident of Nouvelle on the south shore of Quebec's Gaspé Peninsula, spent about 15 years dealing with liver problems that eventually progressed to cirrhosis and liver cancer.

Just before he was wheeled into surgery for a liver transplant, his doctor gave him some unexpected news about the organ: it was regenerated by a new machine, used for the first time at Montreal’s Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal , or CHUM.

“ [My doctor] told me about the new machine that he worked on for a few years,” Landry said. “It was like a Christmas gift."

The technology, called Liver Assist, allows doctors to treat and assess a donated liver outside the human body before transplanting it. For Landry, it meant receiving an organ that might otherwise have been considered too risky to use.

This Quebec patient is the 1st in North America to receive a regenerated liver

Dr. David Hénault, hepatopancreatobiliary surgeon and liver transplant specialist at the CHUM, led the project and performed Landry's operation.

He said the team had been preparing to use the technology for about three years.

The Liver Assist system works by connecting a donated liver to a machine that circulates an oxygen-rich fluid through the organ, which can help reverse some of the damage caused by a lack of oxygen while the organ is outside the body.

The technology then allows doctors to switch to a blood-based solution and assess how the liver functions in conditions designed to mimic the human body.

“If it works on the machine, then it’s going to work in the human,” Hénault said.

The liver Landry received was particularly well suited to the technology because it was susceptible to damage caused by a lack of oxygen during the organ transfer process, Hénault said.

The CHUM performs about 70 liver transplants each year. Hénault said a study done with Transplant Québec looked at livers that had previously been declined for transplantation and assessed which ones might have been recoverable using the new technology .

The team estimates the machine could make an additional 20 to 24 livers available for transplantation during its first year of use. That number could grow as the technology becomes more widely used.