The Royal Academy of Engineering has announced the finalists for the 2025 MacRobert Award, the longest running and most prestigious prize for UK engineering innovation.
The MacRobert Award is run by the Royal Academy of Engineering and recognises engineering teams that demonstrate outstanding innovation, tangible societal benefit and proven commerciality within the UK engineering sector.
The three finalists for the 2025 MacRobert Award include OrganOx (Oxford) for creating a transportable normothermic organ perfusion device, which is a world first originating from research at the University of Oxford.
OrganOx was spun out of the University of Oxford in 2008 by biomedical engineer Professor Constantin Coussios OBE FREng FMedSci and transplant surgeon Professor Peter Friend FMedSci FRCS to translate an innovative technology capable of keeping organs alive and functioning outside the body for several days. Applied to livers and kidneys, the OrganOx metra makes it possible to preserve organs for longer than ever before, test them objectively before deciding whether to transplant them, and even use a second human or pig organ outside the body to enable the patient's own liver to recover from injury and thus avoid a transplant altogether.
The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, Professor Irene Tracey CBE FRS, commented: 'OrganOx exemplifies Oxford's knack for combining and effectively translating technological innovation and the very best of medical science for patient and societal impact. Nurtured by cross-disciplinary research and collaboration, it is the first of many medical technologies and biotechnologies presently emerging from the University's world-leading innovation and translational ecosystem that are transforming the future of healthcare.'
OrganOx Extra-corporeal Liver SupportSince gaining regulatory approval in 2018 following an Oxford-led clinical study published as a cover story in Nature , OrganOx's automated normothermic machine perfusion technology has been used to preserve and successfully transplant over 6,000 livers on 4 continents and 12 countries. Demonstrating the ability to safely transplant over 70% of organs that were discarded under conventional organ preservation practices , the OrganOx metra has enabled an additional 2,395 life-saving transplants to take place across the USA in 2023 and 2024 alone, with participating centres reporting a 25-30% increase in transplant volumes within current donation practices.
An independent 2024 study by one of the largest North-American liver transplant centres, the Cleveland Clinic, credited the OrganOx metra for their median waitlist time reduction from 49 to 14 days, and for a halving of waiting list mortality from 13.3% to 6.3% between 2019 and 2023, whilst also lowering the overall costs per transplanted patient .
OrganOx metra CoverExtending the technology to other organs , the first 36 kidneys were successfully transplanted in a first-in-human trial of prolonged normothermic kidney perfusion conducted in Oxford , which evidenced safe doubling of preservation time to 36 hours, a notable shift from night-time to day-time operating, and viability assessment of marginal grafts to increase utilization.
In a third innovation aimed at extra-corporeal liver support, the use of either genetically modified porcine or discarded human livers on the OrganOx metra is expected to enable successful treatment of the 60,000 patients per annum suffering from Acute-on-Chronic Liver Failure who today experience 70% mortality without transplantation. In 2024, the liver organ perfusion technology was successfully paired for the very first time with a genetically modified porcine organ to demonstrate the ability to extracorporeally maintain liver function in three decedents . This approach was recently authorized by the FDA to enter first-in-human trials in the United states .
The winner of the 2025 MacRobert award will be announced during a special awards ceremony on Tuesday 8th July.
