Artificial Liver Used in Historic Operation : Medicine: Woman is kept alive for 14 hours until a second human donor is found. Doctor says it is the first time a patient’s malfunctioning organ has been removed before a transplant was available.

A man-made liver was used for the first time to sustain a patient’s life after a failing transplanted liver was removed from an 18-year-old Southern California woman, a doctor who performed the surgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center said Monday.

The man-made organ, called a “bioartificial liver device,” uses pig liver cells, cellulose fibers and various components to mimic a human liver.

Dr. Achilles Demetriou, who said he has been developing the device since the early 1970s, performed the surgery with Dr. Luis Podesta at Cedars-Sinai three weeks ago.

The artificial device sustained the woman for 14 hours until another donor liver was found. It is uncertain how long the artificial device could have kept her alive.

“After a liver became available, we used it,” Demetriou said.

The patient was doing “extraordinarily well” on Monday, said Ronald Wise, a spokesman for the hospital. The identity of the teen-ager and her hometown were not made public at the family’s request, Wise said.

Physicians said they believe the procedure saved the woman’s life. Before removal of the the woman’s first transplanted human liver, which had been implanted a day before, her brain had swelled from toxins circulating in her blood as a result of the bad liver, and her vital signs indicated she was approaching death, Wise said.

The liver, essential to life, performs many functions. Among the most important functions are storing and filtering blood and removing toxins.

The bioartificial liver device works by cleansing blood that normally would be cleaned by a healthy liver, then recirculating the purified blood through the body. The device is contained in a plastic cylinder about 20 inches long and 4 inches wide.

The device used by the Cedars-Sinai physicians was designed to serve as a stopgap until a second donor liver could be found. Ultimately, the goal of medical researchers is to find a permanent artificial replacement for the liver because not enough human livers are available.

Demetriou has used the artificial device on seven patients, but in each of the earlier cases his patients kept their own malfunctioning livers. Elsewhere physicians have used the livers from pigs to serve as temporary organs until donor livers could be obtained for transplants.

When the woman was admitted to the hospital April 19, she was comatose. Demetriou initially hooked the young woman up to the artificial device while waiting for the first donor liver, and her condition improved. Two days later, however, the woman’s condition deteriorated and, with her in “imminent danger of death,” she was put back on the device, Demetriou said.

As her condition continued to deteriorate, Demetriou decided to remove the woman’s first transplanted liver because it was releasing toxins and leave her solely on the artificial device. Demetriou said the patient’s condition began to improve “significantly.”