Waleed Hassanein - Sustaining transplant organs (ceremony)

🎥 Jun 15, 2017 📺 European Patent Office ⏱ 2m 👁 1831 views

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About Waleed Hassanein

Waleed Hassanein, founder, president, and CEO of TransMedics, announced in May 2025 plans to establish a second headquarters in Mirandola, Italy, describing the location as having the technical expertise and talent pool for medical device disposables. He stated that the company will build a research and development facility for next-generation perfusion systems and later transition to manufacturing clean-room production of disposable units. Hassanein said the company has been called "the Ferrari of transplant perfusion devices" and that locating in the same region as Ferrari would "make that rumor a reality." He declined to comment on politics but said the company's mission is to help patients and save lives, adding that they will find a way to overcome geopolitical challenges. In 2022, Hassanein expressed enthusiasm for the ISHLT annual meeting returning to Boston and said TransMedics looked forward to sharing results of clinical trials involving its Organ Care System heart and lung technologies, as well as a national program structure aimed at maximizing donor organ utilization. In 2017, he described the Organ Care System as a portable device that maintains organs in a living state outside the body by perfusing them with warm, oxygenated blood, contrasting it with cold storage, which he said limits organ viability to 3-6 hours. He noted that at the time, only 2-3 out of every 10 donated organs were used with cold storage, and that TransMedics had raised close to $300 million in investment and performed more than 800 successful transplants.

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Transcript (1 segments)

Waleed Hassanein0:08

This is a living and breathing lung. The Organ Care System is the only portable medical device designed to maintain human organs in their normal physiologic living condition outside the human body. We do that by continuously perfusing the organ with warm, oxygenated and nutrient enriched blood to make the organs believe they are still in the body. For the last four decades organ preservation for transplant was limited to cold storage, literally a picnic cooler filled with ice. The organ has 3 to 6 hours maximum to be transported from the donor to the recipient. Every minute goes by the organ is dying in this condition. For example, we only use 2-3 out of every 10 donated available human organs today with the cold ischemic storage. The Organ Care System changes all that. During my first heart transplant, I was shocked to recognize that the heart will be placed in a picnic cooler for preservation. And that's when I decided that there has to be a better way to preserve organs outside the body. Due to the strength of our global patent portfolio TransMedics was able to raise close to 300 million dollars of investment to help develop and commercialise the Organ Care System platform. Today we have more than 800 successful transplants performed. In our system the lung is breathing, the heart is beating, the liver is making bile and the kidneys are producing urine, enabling the gift of life for sick patients in need.