The pathology of ischemia-reperfusion injury in coronary heart disease, the leading cause for death in western countries, is still not fully elucidated. Data obtained from classical Langendorff experiments may be misleading since erythrocyte-free buffers such as Krebs-Henseleit or Tyrode solutions have a 100-fold lower oxygen carrying capacity compared to blood leaving heart tissue essentially hypoxic. Furthermore, factors originating from erythrocytes and white cells are missing and due to the lack of red cells viscosity of the perfusion fluid and thus shear forces on the endothelial cells are completely different from the in vivo situation. Blood perfused Langendorff preparations as an alternative using even the smallest commercially available membrane oxygenators have priming volumes between 50 and 200 ml requiring at least 10 rats as blood donors per experiment. Here we introduce an isolated, autologous blood-perfused Langendorff heart preparation with a priming volume of about 3-5 ml obtained from the same rat sacrificed for heart isolation. This model is based on the development of a miniature oxygenator combined with a heat exchanger.

In principle this model can easily be adjusted to mouse heart preparations or used for in vitro myocardial infarction studies. Preliminary results have shown that isolated rat hearts perfused continuously with autologous blood at 37°C beat for several hours at heart rates between 250 and 300 min-1.