How long are patients usually on the organ donor list for a liver?
Dr. Robert Brown: That also depends on how sick they are. We have moved from a time-based waiting system for livers to a severity-based liver system. Now the sickest patients go first, and those that are healthier wait longer, so your waiting time could be as little as a day and a half if you’re in the highest urgency category, to many, many years if you’re stable. The problem is, as your urgency category changes, the liver availability may not change with you. Who’s a good candidate for this machine? Dr. Robert Brown: Right now, we’re focusing on two disease entities. First, patients who have stable, chronic liver disease, cirrhosis — many of whom need transplants already, who have an acute deterioration, either due to going into a coma, sometimes related to infection, something tips them over, and their liver gets acutely worse. The hope is that you can temporize them, and their liver can get back to whatever base line they were at, or that you’ll make them in better physiologic sha
