After procuring a donor heart and lungs, Smidt Heart Institute transplant surgeons and procurement staff posed alongside their three airline pilots before leaving Honolulu. (photo courtesy of Cedars-Sinai)

Dr. Dominic Emerson and Dr. Pedro Catarino, transplant surgeons with the Smidt Heart Institute, know how to be spontaneous. At any given moment, they can get the call that a donor heart or lungs are available, requiring them to quickly board a private aircraft to procure the vital organs.

Until recently, those flights were quick jaunts lasting no more than four hours – the time a donor heart can survive on ice. Now that is all changing, thanks to a medical device called the OCS Heart, or “Heart in a Box,” which enables transplant surgeons to travel to much farther destinations to procure lifesaving organs by acting as a miniature intensive care unit that keeps the heart alive.

“The Heart in a Box technology is helping break down a major barrier of transplantation, ultimately offering many patients a second chance at life,” said Emerson, associate surgical director of heart transplant and mechanical circulatory support and surgical co-director of the Cardiac Surgery Intensive Care Unit at Cedars-Sinai.

Once a donor heart is removed from the body, instead of being placed on ice in a cooler, the heart is connected to a portable device that keeps it at a human-like, metabolically active state, allowing transplant surgeons to travel farther distances to retrieve donor hearts.

Recently, Emerson and Catarino flew to Hawaii – a state with limited heart transplant availability – to procure a heart and lungs from a donor. The heart spent more than seven hours outside of a human body being oxygenated and maintained in a beating state with the OCS Heart device.

Once the surgeons, heart and lungs arrived at Cedars-Sinai, Emerson headed straight into surgery to perform the heart transplant. Donald Stivers, 74, who had been battling ischemic cardiomyopathy, received the heart as part of an ongoing clinical trial evaluating the system as a way to use hearts that would otherwise not be available.

“There are so many mixed emotions, but I am so fortunate-the joy is truly overwhelming,” said Stivers, who lives in Three Rivers, California, and who is eager to resume his once-active lifestyle of hiking in the mountains surrounding his home.

For Emerson and his fellow transplant surgeons, Stivers’ journey makes the long flights, middle-of-the-night surgeries and often-complex cases more than worthwhile.

“Our jobs are predictably unpredictable,” Emerson said. “At the same time, it’s extremely rewarding. At the end of the day, people like Don are so desperately sick, yet you can give them high-quality, memory-building time back to enjoy life.”

For information, visit cedars-sinai.org.