Apersys AG

A critical shortage of donor livers leaves many patients with liver cancer or liver failure without access to life-saving transplants. Compounding this issue, many donated livers are discarded due to limited preservation time or poor initial quality assessments. As a result, only about one-third of eligible patients receive a liver transplant.

During their time at Wyss Zurich, the Apersys team, under the project name Liver4Life, developed a liver perfusion machine designed to keep a liver alive outside of the body. The team was successful in extending the ex-situ preservation time of whole and partial human livers from just one day to an entire week and beyond. In a major milestone, the team performed a first-in-human transplantation following three days of using the novel device to preserve and treat a liver that was discarded by all Swiss transplant centers. This next-generation technology has the potential to enable long-term preservation, continuous viability assessment, and real time organ recovery, ultimately transforming previously unusable donor organs into viable options for transplantation.