liver dcd project

Organ transplantation is considered the therapy of choice for end-stage organ failure. However, the growing gap between the number of patients waiting for transplantation and available organs continue to be the number one issue facing the transplant community. As a consequence the major focus in liver transplantation has been developing strategies to increase available donor. The use of organs procured from donors after circulatory death has increased the pool of potential liver donors. However, donation after cardiac Death (DCD) livers are at increased risk of primary graft dysfunction. We conducted RNA-sequencing experiments using DCD livers from the rat model to assess the short-term feasibility and functional efficacy of DCD livers. Using RNA-sequencing data, we found that liver transcriptome level would have a great change in rat livers subjected to 15 minutes of cardiac arrest, which indicated a great loss of normal function of DCD livers before transplantation.