London doctors perform Canada's first ‘heart in a box’ transplant
Doctors at London Health Sciences Centre have performed Canada's first heart transplant using a portable 'heart in a box' device. This technology keeps the donor organ warm and beating outside the body, potentially increasing the availability of donor hearts by 40 percent.
Why it matters
This medical advancement significantly extends the viability window for donor organs, potentially saving many lives currently on transplant waitlists.
at 3:59 p.m. Last Updated: September 24, 2026 at 4:42 p.m. In a Canadian first, London Health Sciences Centre doctors used a portable medical device to keep a donor heart beating outside the body during a heart transplant.
In what LHSC officials are calling a “milestone procedure” that took place in February, the hospital’s transplant team used the provincially shared TransMedics Organ Care System, also known as the “heart in a box,” to transplant a donor heart into a patient.
“It’s a technology that allows us to take a heart that comes from a dead donor, literally dead, and attach it to this machine with some donor blood and restart the heart,” said Dave Nagpal, medical co-director of LHSC’s multi-organ transplant program and director of cardiac transplantation at LHSC.
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