Organ Recovery

Market position

The company describes itself as a global market-leading provider of organ preservation products and services and states it introduced the first portable hypothermic machine perfusion system in 2003. It reports LifePort Kidney Transporter has been referenced by name in more than 60 clinical studies and is the only machine perfusion kidney device included in three paired-kidney analysis studies, with SPS-1 and KPS-1 described as market-leading preservation solutions.

Points of differentiation cited by the company include a decade of published clinical outcome data in the New England Journal of Medicine, published studies showing better 1-year, 3-year and 10-year deceased-donor graft survival versus static cold storage, integrated real-time tracking and remote monitoring of the device and organ, portability for ground and air transport, and a clinical support team with more than 200 combined years of organ preservation experience available through a 24/7 helpline.

Technology

The LifePort Kidney Transporter is a portable hypothermic machine perfusion system that provides a sealed sterile chamber in which a specially formulated physiologic solution is pulsatile-pumped through a kidney at cold temperature; perfusion pressure can be adjusted per organ. Each unit carries a transmitter that securely transmits encrypted device and location data to a protected web portal for remote monitoring during ground or air transport. Complementary chemistry products are the SPS-1 (UW) static preservation solution and the KPS-1 machine perfusion solution, which rapidly cool organs to reduce cellular injury during cold ischemia. A LifePort Liver Transporter applies oxygenated hypothermic machine perfusion to livers and remains investigational in the United States.

Go-to-market

The company sells directly to OPOs and transplant centers and competes for national procurement tenders, supporting adoption with on-site training and wet labs, online training modules in a client community portal, refresher videos, a mobile troubleshooting app, a 24/7 perfusion helpline, and customer testimonial and clinical-evidence content. It also participates in and funds clinical studies to build published evidence for its devices.

Organ procurement organizations (OPOs), transplant centers and hospital transplant programs, perfusionists and transplant clinicians; the company reports supporting transplant programs in dozens of countries, with named users including Tampa General Hospital, UT Health San Antonio, Nevada Donor Network, LifeSharing, Versiti and University Medical Center of Southern Nevada.

Geography

Headquarters in Itasca, Illinois (Chicago area) at One Pierce Place, with a satellite office in Diegem, Belgium (Brussels). The company states support for transplant programs across dozens of countries, including a nationwide kidney HMP program in France and a national randomized controlled trial in Brazil, and LifePort Preservation Centers in Newark, New Jersey and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

History

Organ Recovery Systems was founded in October 1998. It launched the LifePort Kidney Transporter in 2003, which was named among Popular Science's Best of What's New that year and subsequently received design recognition including an Industrial Design Excellence Award and a Medical Design Excellence Award (2004), selection for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Triennial (2004), inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art permanent collection and Business Week's Top 10 Devices Changing the World (2006), an IDSA Catalyst honorable mention (2007), and IDSA "Design of the Decade" silver (2010). The New England Journal of Medicine published 1-year Machine Preservation Trial results in 2009 and 3-year follow-up in 2012. France implemented a nationwide kidney HMP program on LifePort in 2013, and Brazil ran a national randomized controlled trial in 2015. The PILOT liver perfusion study enrolled its first patients in 2019, with the first liver transplants under the PILOT Continued Access study in 2022. LifePort Preservation Centers opened in Newark (2021) and Philadelphia (2024), and the company reached 275,000 kidneys preserved in 2025.

Risks & controversies

The LifePort Liver Transporter has not been cleared or approved by the FDA, its safety and effectiveness have not been established, and it is not available for sale in the United States.