Recent Advances in Organ Transplantation

Dear Colleagues,

Organ transplantation faces many challenges; the shortage of donor organs will continue to be a major issue. Indications for organ transplantation are expanding, and transplantation in many countries is based on the increasing use of expanded-criteria donor organs.

The mismatch between supply and demand and the challenges associated with the use of marginal organs have led to close collaboration between bioengineering and clinical medicine in recent years. In transplantation medicine, machine perfusion is a good example of mutual enrichment: its success would not have been possible without the coincidence of major advances in bioengineering and urgent clinical needs.

Within a short period of time, machine perfusion has been established in clinical practice for almost all organs. The future holds the potential for further improvements, and collaboration will help to achieve unmet goals. Many questions remain unanswered. These include very basic questions about optimal temperature, flows, perfusate, and further refinement of the physiological environment with additional substrate depletion (e.g., dialysis options, filter solutions, and specific absorption options). Viability testing is also in its infancy; reliable parameters for the selection of marginal organs for transplantation will be of paramount importance for the safe expansion of the donor pool. This Special Issue invites contributions on all aspects of machine perfusion.

The next generation of organ perfusion machines will focus on long-term use. Long-term perfusion will be the basis for true organ refinement. Several therapeutic strategies have been tested in normothermic machine perfusion with promising results: e.g., viral transfection, stem cell therapies, and gene silencing. Looking further ahead, this Special Issue would like to address the potential of xenotransplantation and tissue engineering and provide an update on current developments in these areas of transplantation.

Dr. Thomas Vogel
Prof. Dr. Falk Rauchfuss
Prof. Dr. Constantin Coussios
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Bioengineering is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• liver transplantation
• kidney transplantation
• pancreas transplantation
• normothermic machine perfusion (NMP)
• hypothermic machine perfusion