The man survives with titanium heart for 100 days – a world first
Titanium hearts can serve as a stopgap for people with heart failure who are waiting for a donor organ
Bivacor is a total heart replacement made of titanium.
Jason Fochman/Houston Chronicle through Getty Image
In his forty -fifth year, an Australian man has become the first person in the world to leave the hospital with artificial heart made of titanium. The device is used as a stopgap for people with heart failure that a donor is waiting for the heart, and the previous recipients of this type of artificial heart were made in American hospitals, while it was in place.
The man lived with the device for more than three months until he performed surgery to achieve a donated human heart. According to a statement by St. Vincent Hospital in Sydney, Australia, the man was well recovering, where the operation was done. The Australian is the sixth person globally to achieve the device, known as Bivakor, but the first to stay with it for more than a month.
“This is certainly an important development in the region,” Julian Smith says, a cardiac surgeon at the Victorian Heart Institute at the University of Monash, Melbourne, Australia.
On supporting science journalism
If you are enjoying this article, consider supporting our award winning journalism Subscribe By purchasing a membership, you are helping to ensure the future of impressive stories about discoveries and ideas that shape our world.
“It is incredibly innovative,” says Sarah Atcon, a vascular surgeon at the University of Sydney, but she says that there are still many unanswered questions about the level of the function that people can get with it and the final cost of the device. “This type of research is really challenging because it is very expensive” and the surgery involved is a lot of risk, says Atcon.
The latest success will help researchers understand how people deal with this tool in the real world, Joseph Rogers, a heart -winning cardiologist and Chairman of the Texas Heart Institute at Houston. “They were not constantly monitoring by medical teams, saying Rogers, who led Rogers, who led the first test of the device in the United States last year,” says Rogers says.
In all cases, Bivacor was used as a temporary remedy before the donor heart was available. Some cardiologists say it can become a permanent option for people, which are not eligible for transplantation due to their age or other health conditions, although the idea still needs to be tested in tests. In the United States, 7 million adults live close to heart failure, but due to lack of donors, only 4,500 heart transplants were performed in 2023.
Suspended rotor
Bivacor was invented by biomedical engineer Daniel Tims, who established a company named after devices with offices in Huntington Beach, California and Southport, Australia.
The device is a total heart replacement and acts as a continuous pump in which a magnetically suspended rotor induces blood throughout the body to regular pulses. A cord device under the skin connects the device to an external, portable controller that runs on the battery according to the day and can be plugged into the men’s at night.
Many mechanical heart appliances support the left side of the heart, and usually work by pooling the blood in a sack, which flexes about 35 million times a year to pump the blood. But these devices have many parts and often have failures. Rogers says, Biwakor, which has only one moving part, will experience less mechanical wearing problems in principle.
American test
Bivacor’s Australian recipient had severe heart failure, and received a titanium device in a six -hour operation in November. In February, he was discharged from the hospital, stayed near a residence and led a relatively normal life. In March, he found a donor heart.
In the US trial led by Rogers, five people in their mid-fortywaras received a pre-version of the Bivacor device last year for the mid-forty-forty-fourth year. The device kept these people in the hospital for a month, but was not designed to support them at home. All five persons were later discharged with the donor hearts. Rogers plans to present the results in a scientific meeting in April.
Since then, the Bivacor team has improved the device to reduce the risk of failure, William Kohan, a heart surgeon at the Texas Heart Institute and the Chief Medical Officer William Kohan at Bivacor.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved other 15 persons to expand the test. Atcan says that there are still a lot of steps “before it becomes a treatment that will be able to use the general public”.
In February, FDA also approved the first test Pig-edge transplantationAnother contender technique to help relieve global deficiency of donor organs.
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published On March 13, 2025.
