Our heart transplant team members are also physician-researchers dedicated to developing better, safer heart transplant procedures and technologies. Clinical trials can provide more treatment options for people with advanced heart failure, often years before those options are widely available.
Current areas of heart transplant research include:
Easier detection and prevention of heart transplant rejection
A body’s rejection of a transplanted heart can be devastating. Identifying rejection early can help reverse the process. We currently identify rejection with a heart biopsy, which carries a risk of complications, such as blood clots, arrhythmia, or infection at the biopsy site.
Penn Medicine is researching the use of blood tests to detect heart transplant rejection without the risks of biopsy. Members of our team are also investigating new types of medications given just after transplant to reduce the risk of rejection.
Expanding the pool of available hearts
We led one of the first academic studies that paved the way for the use of heart transplants from donors who were positive for hepatitis C. Previously, we could not accept these organs. Researchers from Penn Medicine became the first to publish a clinical protocol for transplanting a heart from a hepatitis C-positive donor. As a result, there are up to 2,000 more hearts available across the U.S.
Developing systems for transporting donor hearts longer distances
The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) coordinates organ matching in the U.S. When a donor heart becomes available, we work to transplant the heart as quickly as possible. Penn Medicine is working with studies of organ perfusion systems that circulate fluid and nutrients to donor hearts in transit to keep them healthy longer and expand the pool of donor hearts.