It’s late on a Friday afternoon at the Nashville International Airport when Dr. Marty Sellers hops out of a van and strides towards a small private jet idling on the runway.
Sellers and his organ retrieval team from Tennessee Donor Services are flying to Chattanooga to try to recover a liver and two kidneys from an organ donor.
“We’re doing an NRP recovery,” says Sellers, referring to normothermic regional perfusion, a new kind of organ retrieval procedure Sellers calls “revolutionary.”
“It replenishes the oxygen deprivation that the organs incur during the dying process,” says Sellers. “If we recover the organ and put it on ice in an oxygen-deprived state, it’s not as healthy when it gets into the recipient. And this way, it’s actually recovered in a healthier state so that when it does get to the recipient it’s more likely to work.”
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