New technology allows Northwestern Medicine’s transplant team to travel further to obtain donor hearts for surgery.
NBC Chicago was granted Northwestern Medicine access to videos taken during a recent purchase in January.
The video shows Dr. Benjamin Bryner, a transplant surgeon, and other members of the NM team loaded the TransMedics “Organ Care System Heart” machine into an SUV that was then given a police escort to Midway Airport, where the team and the machine boarded. a plane to retrieve the donor heart from an undisclosed location.
“It’s a lot of time away, longer than we can fly and get back to cold storage, on ice,” Bryner said.
The donor heart was purchased for John Baggio, 69, an artist from Prospect Heights. A genetic condition had weakened his heart severely over the years, causing it to be unable to pump blood effectively.
A heart pump was installed to keep him alive and he is in the hospital at Northwestern Medicine while he waits for a donor heart.
Online research about the transplant process led him to a previous NBC Chicago story from November about technology used at Northwestern, which allows a heart donated after circulatory death to remain alive for surgery by using a new technology nicknamed a “Heart in a Box. .”
“I looked it up online and I saw your piece on NBC with the first candidate. And that’s just amazing,” Baggio told NBC 5. “I mean, you have this glass box and a heartbeat inside, and they can carry it from 12 to 24 hours.”
When he saw the story, Baggio had no idea that the same technology would make his transplant possible weeks later.
After getting the donor heart at another hospital, it was connected to a “heart in a box” machine and brought back to Chicago for Baggio’s successful transplant surgery on January 24, 2023.
“This machine helped us get a heart for him in a short way in a way we couldn’t have done without it,” Bryner said.
Baggio said he is grateful to the donor family, the entire team at Northwestern Medicine and this new technology that made his transplant possible.
“It opens up the whole country. This is amazing. It’s unbelievable,” Baggio said.