Since the first human heart transplant nearly 50 years ago, the standard of care for transporting donor organs has changed little. A heart, kidney, or liver is harvested, cleaned, placed in a cooler on ice, and shipped off via ambulance or jet plane. There are fancier transport containers, but they can be prohibitively expensive or too unwieldy to travel long distances. For a particular organ—the intestine—a cooler simply won’t work. A doctor worked with engineering students to find a way to transport intestines for transplant.
Read more: http://yalemedicine.yale.edu/winter2016/features/feature/222247/