Australian Man Makes History by Living With a Titanium Heart for More Than 100 Days Before Receiving a Transplant
The man, who was in his 40s and suffering from severe heart failure, was also the first person to leave the hospital with a titanium heart. He is recovering well after getting a new, donor heart
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A man in Australia spent more than 100 days with a titanium heart pumping blood around his body while he waited for a human heart transplant. His case marks the longest anyone has lived with the technology to date—and the first time anyone has left the hospital with a titanium heart, reports CNN’s Hilary Whiteman.
The patient was a man in his 40s from New South Wales who was suffering from severe heart failure. The man, who wishes to remain anonymous, volunteered to have a titanium heart inserted at St. Vincent’s Hospital Sydney until a matching human organ became available.
“In this case, the patient had a very weak left side and right side of the heart, and so we didn’t have any other option really,” says Chris Hayward, a transplant cardiologist at St. Vincent’s Hospital Sydney who helped treat the man, in a video shared by the hospital. “He was in what we call heart failure, where his fluid builds up and he can’t walk any distance … before becoming very short of breath.”
The man underwent a six-hour surgery in November. He remained in the hospital—under the close supervision of doctors—until February, when he became the first person to be discharged with the device. He lived near the hospital and led a relatively normal life, reports Nature News’ Smriti Mallapaty.
Then, in early March, a matching donor heart was identified, and the man underwent a successful transplant surgery. He’s recovering well, according to his doctors.
The man received an artificial heart made of titanium called BiVACOR. For now, the device is meant to be a stopgap for patients awaiting donor hearts. But, in the future, proponents say the technology may negate the need for heart transplants entirely.
BiVACOR was developed by Daniel Timms, an Australian inventor and biomedical engineer. The device uses a magnetically suspended rotor to pump blood throughout the body and lungs at regular intervals—just like a real human heart would. Since the rotor is suspended, it doesn’t rub against any other mechanical parts, which means it should experience less wear and tear over time compared to other artificial hearts. The rotor is also the only moving part in this device, making it simpler and more durable.
The nearly 1.5-pound artificial heart is powered by an external device, which is connected by a wire that runs through the patient’s chest. During the day, the external device can run on batteries, and it’s plugged into an electrical outlet at night.
Right now, the batteries must be changed every four hours. But Timms hopes to make improvements to BiVACOR that would eliminate the need for an external battery altogether, per the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Elise Worthington and Paige Cockburn. The vision is something like wireless phone charging, with a charger placed over the patient’s chest in a way that won’t burn their skin.
Timms says the inspiration for the device came from spending time with his father, who was a plumber. Later, his father died from heart failure, which motivated Timms even more.
“There’s a lot of inventions in Australia, and sometimes we feel they get lost overseas,” he tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
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The Australian man is the sixth person in the world to have a BiVACOR implant. The other five patients—who were all men in their mid-40s to mid-60s—underwent surgery in the United States last year as part of a trial. All five men lived with the device in a hospital for up to a month until donor hearts became available.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration then approved an expansion of the trial to include another 15 patients, but the device is still at least a few years away from reaching the general public.
“If all goes well with the clinical trials, I could imagine the device being available more globally in four to five years,” says Joseph Rogers, a cardiologist who is leading the U.S. trials and serves as president and CEO of the Texas Heart Institute, to Al Jazeera’s Areesha Lodhi.
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As it’s designed now, BiVACOR is meant to be a short-term solution for patients suffering from heart failure. But, someday, experts hope it could develop into a more permanent option.
“Within the next decade, we will see the artificial heart becoming the alternative for patients who are unable to wait for a donor heart or when a donor heart is simply not available,” Hayward tells CNN.
In America, nearly 6.7 million adults suffer from heart failure, a serious condition in which the heart can no longer pump enough blood and oxygen to support the body’s other organs, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Surgeons performed 4,545 heart transplants in the U.S. in 2023. Right now, 3,630 patients are on the waiting list for a heart transplant in the country, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network.
