Preoperative low-dose irradiation promotes long-term allograft acceptance and induces regulatory T cells in a porcine model of pulmonary transplantation.

Background: A simplified conditioning protocol including single-dose preoperative thymic and low-dose whole body irradiation with or without subsequent donor bone marrow transplantation (BMTx) can be applied in porcine lung transplantation. We hypothesized that this protocol would prolong allograft survival.

Methods: Left-sided single lung transplantation from major histocompatibility complex (MHC)-mismatched donors was performed in 27 minipigs.

In-situ topical cooling of lung grafts: early graft function and surfactant analysis in a porcine single lung transplant model.

Objective: Improvement of organ preservation is essential to facilitate acceptance of marginal donor lungs for transplantation. Thus, recruiting non-heart-beating donors (NHBD) may be one reasonable strategy to augment the organ-pool especially in the field of pulmonary transplantation. Topical cooling (TC) of donor lungs could provide fast organ-protection and is an available procedure even in smaller centers.