Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the NHS news story entitled Machine that keeps livers 'alive' may boost transplant rates, published in April 2018, whether the NHS has any plans to commission further research on such liver storage facilities.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published a report in January on machine perfusion, which are machines that provide organs with blood, nutrients, and medicines outside the body. NICE said that these machines are safe to use, but that evidence on their efficacy is limited and should only be used with special arrangements for clinical governance.

Normothermic machine perfusion is currently being used for livers in one hospital in the United Kingdom on a trial basis. This technology is still considered novel and experimental. NHS Blood and Transplant, as the organ donation organisation for the United Kingdom, is supporting National Health Service hospitals’ research into perfusion technology and how it can enable more organs to be used for transplantation. NHS Blood and Transplant’s Research, Innovative and Novel Technologies Advisory Group oversees the use and progress of novel technologies for transplantation and will monitor the effectiveness of the use of these machines in the UK. When there is more evidence, it will make a recommendation on whether they should be commissioned.