Liver technology to become routine at Addenbrooke’s Hospital

50 years after Europe’s first successful procedure at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, the hospital has announced that it has become the first in the UK to bring state-of-the-art liver technology into routine use.

The perfusion machine at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge maintains a donor liver outside the body by pumping it with blood, nutrients and medicine, rather than the traditional method of keeping the liver in ice.

Marking the 50th anniversary alongside Professor Sir Roy Calne, who led the first transplant on 2 May 1968, Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust has launched a £250,000 appeal to run a state-of-the art ‘liver perfusion’ machine. The support, which will fund machine consumables, means that Addenbrooke’s Hospital becomes the only liver transplant centre in the UK to use the perfusion technique as part of its standard clinical practice.

The procedure could mean a further 54 liver transplants over two years.

Shelly Thake, chief executive of Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust, said: “When Professor Watson and his colleagues told us about their incredible cutting edge work with liver perfusion we wanted to do all we could to help. The liver perfusion machine will allow potentially up to an additional 50 transplants to be carried out over two years. That’s 50 people being given the chance of a better quality of life. It is apt that this appeal coincides with the 50th anniversary of the first successful liver transplant in Europe and we think the public will embrace it.”

Sir Roy Calne added: “It is a big step and it will become a bigger step as more experience is accumulated on how to use the machine, and how much the machine can make a bad liver that's damaged better for transplantation.”