The Royal Academy of Engineering has announced the finalists for the 2025 MacRobert Award, which honors engineering teams demonstrating exceptional innovation, societal benefit, and commercial viability within the UK. Among the three finalists is OrganOx from Oxford, recognized for its pioneering work in developing a transportable normothermic organ perfusion device.
OrganOx emerged from research at the University of Oxford and was founded in 2008 by biomedical engineer Professor Constantin Coussios OBE FREng FMedSci and transplant surgeon Professor Peter Friend FMedSci FRCS. The company focuses on technology that preserves organs outside the body for several days, enabling longer preservation times and objective testing before transplantation. This innovation applies to livers and kidneys and allows the use of an external human or pig organ to aid a patient's liver recovery without needing a transplant.
Professor Irene Tracey CBE FRS, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, remarked on OrganOx's achievement: "OrganOx exemplifies Oxford’s knack for combining and effectively translating technological innovation and the very best of medical science for patient and societal impact."
Since receiving regulatory approval in 2018 after an Oxford-led clinical study published in Nature, OrganOx's machine perfusion technology has facilitated over 6,000 successful liver transplants across four continents. In particular, it enabled an additional 2,395 life-saving transplants in the USA during 2023 and 2024 alone. Participating centers reported a significant increase in transplant volumes under current donation practices.
An independent study conducted by Cleveland Clinic highlighted OrganOx metra's impact on reducing median waitlist times from 49 to 14 days while halving waiting list mortality rates between 2019 and 2023. The technology also reduced overall costs per transplanted patient.
Expanding its reach beyond liver transplants, OrganOx successfully transplanted kidneys using prolonged normothermic kidney perfusion in a first-in-human trial at Oxford. This trial doubled preservation time to 36 hours and improved graft utilization.
Additionally, OrganOx is exploring extra-corporeal liver support using genetically modified porcine or discarded human livers. This approach aims to treat patients with Acute-on-Chronic Liver Failure who face high mortality rates without transplantation. In a recent development authorized by the FDA for first-in-human trials in the United States, this method demonstrated maintaining liver function extracorporeally using genetically modified porcine organs.
The winner of this year's MacRobert Award will be revealed during a ceremony scheduled for Tuesday, July 8th.