Hormonal treatment in transplantation: donor and graft management strategies

The growing shortage of organs for transplant and the increasing number of patients waiting for a transplant highlight the need for better ways to manage brain-dead donors and new treatments to improve the quality of donated organs. This research looks at how different factors, like the donor's sex and the cause of brain death, can affect how organs respond to the changes that occur during brain death. The main focus of the study is to test a new treatment combining 17β-estradiol (E2) and methylprednisolone (MP) to improve the quality of organs for transplantation. The study first tested these treatments on female animals to see how they affected lung (Chapter 2) and kidney (Chapter 3) quality after brain death was induced. It then explored how the rate at which brain death is induced impacts organs from both male and female animals (Chapter 4). Finally, the research looked at how the treatment affected lung and kidney quality during ex vivo machine perfusion, which is a method of preserving organs outside the body (Chapters 5 and 6). The findings of this study help us better understand how treatments can improve organ quality and highlight the differences between male and female donors when it comes to organ response.