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CEO
David Kravitz, the founder of Organ Recovery Systems (ORS), has dedicated his career to helping improve patient lives through innovating technologies in the field of low-temperature medicine. In the 1990s, David co-founded and led a company under contract with the U.S. military to develop medical technologies employing therapeutic hypothermia for deployment in combat zones to protect the brain from neurological complications during battlefield trauma.
His work in this space turned personal – when his father was placed on the heart transplant waiting list in California with only weeks to spare. In the agonizing wait for a donor, David could not help but observe the unreliability and significant limitations of donor organ preservation and consider better ways to protect and preserve a life-saving organ in its critical journey from donor to recipient.
Realizing the potential for applying his learnings in hypothermic therapy for combat casualty care to the organ transplant space, he was inspired to create a family of portable machine-preservation devices, employing active therapeutic hypothermia for donor organs.
In 1998, he founded Organ Recovery System’s (ORS) and with his team created the LifePort technology – a reusable device of hypothermic machine perfusion (HMP) that gently pumps a live-preserving physiologic solution throughout the donor organ while cradled in a precision temperature-controlled environment keeping the organ as healthy as possible during transit.
Today, ORS's technology has preserved over 100,000 donor organs.