Australian man survives 100 days with artificial heart

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/mar/12/australian-man-survives-100-days-with-artificial-heart-in-world-first-success

by n1b0m • 1 year ago

230 96 1 year ago

theguardian.com

wileydragonfly• 1 year ago

A very interesting tour is the small museums at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Heart Institute. They were literally making replacement parts on a sewing machine 60 years ago. (On the other hand, they let one of those surgeons practice too far long and he left a sponge in my grandfather during an angioplasty. He was ultimately reopened and cleaned out and died of something else a few years later)

Willingham• 1 year ago

Looks like the device is powered by a battery carried by the patient that is connected through what is called a ‘driveline’ basically a wire coming out of your belly connecting to the heart. Really amazing stuff here, especially considering failure of the heart is THE most common cause of death in human beings. One day getting an artificial heart at an old age may be as common as a teenager getting braces. https://www.monash.edu/news/articles/monash,-bivacor-led-con...

3eb7988a16632• 1 year ago

Just avoid getting into any bar brawls with Nausicaans.

(https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tapestry_(episode) although, the point of the episode was, in hindsight, the fight was the correct move)

blooalien• 1 year ago

Don't neglect your payments and fall afoul of the Repo-Men either. :P

somenameforme2• 1 year ago

Oh man, you gave me goosebumps just thinking about that episode. That is one of the best episodes [1] of any sci-fi, ever, IMO. That episode changed my entire life perspective.

Looking at the writer's Wiki [2], he was also behind some amazing DS9 episodes like House of Quark and Rules of engagement. Gah, what happened to sci-fi? Turns out he was even the head guy on For All Mankind. Nobel Prize effect, studio pressure, what is it?

[1] https://ww1.goojara.to/eGJakb

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_D._Moore

josu• 1 year ago

I wasn't expecting that steampunk look.

_carbyau_2• 1 year ago

It is kinda cool looking. But if people can see it in your chest you are doing it wrong.

elihu• 1 year ago

My guess is that they put it in some kind of rubbery enclosure before installing it, but who knows? Maybe it's not actually a problem to have hard edges.

keyle• 1 year ago

I know it's crazy. Looks like a car part.

olyjohn2• 1 year ago

Definitely looks like a small turbocharger!

abdusco• 1 year ago

CNC'ed out of a block of titanium

maxglute• 1 year ago

It looks... very crude.

xpl2• 1 year ago

How does the device regulate the heartbeat speed? I mean, how does it know that it needs to pump blood faster or slower?

slicktux• 1 year ago

That’s a good question! As a layman I would assume there’s no way to read/detect the hormones that would demand acceleration of the heartbeat? So one has to take it easy for the rest of their life? Or maybe there’s a way to manipulate it manually?

3eb7988a16632• 1 year ago

If the heart is no longer the weak link, can you permanently increase level of blood flow to something akin to moderate exertion? Presumably you are now limited by what the veins can handle, but maybe they have more flexible performance characteristics?

qingcharles• 1 year ago

IIRC this problem affects heart transplants as the nerve that controls the speed of the heart is severed during the operation.

yazaddaruvala• 1 year ago

Blood oxygen sensors seem relatively cheap and low power.

I wonder if they could use that as the feedback mechanism.

Ideally if the sensors are small, low power, and cheap enough CO2 and lactic acid levels would also be good to check on to increase bloodflow.

monero-xmr• 1 year ago

My friend had this pump pack attached to him (the same thing Dick Cheney had) and it was constant flow. His heart technically worked but it was so weak you could barely detect it. The pump was just constant circulation, no pumping.

aitchnyu• 1 year ago

Hmm, do body processes depend on the fact that blood flows in pulses, and an optimal heart must be pulsed?

iancmceachern2• 1 year ago

It doesn't, neither do lvads

Nextgrid• 1 year ago

Accelerometers to measure physical activity?

briansm• 1 year ago

I would assume the kind of people who need a replacement heart are already on beta-blocker drugs, which clamp the peak heart-rate down significantly, so their body would already be used to a very limited heart-rate range.

JumpinJack_Cash• 1 year ago

Not just for physical activity but for emotions as well, the palpitations before a skydive or the increased heart rate when you are kissing your crush/GF/wife

Not to mention the erection thing.

These things seems trival and of relative importance when compared with life or death but they are still important to go back to live a normal life.

ElFitz• 1 year ago

Transplanted hearts don’t regulate as well as the original one. They seem to default to a higher resting rate, with less heart rate variability.

So maybe, for a temporary device, it isn’t necessary?

epicureanideal• 1 year ago

Let's hope this improves rapidly every year and can become a convenient, inexpensive temporary replacement in a few decades.

I wonder what the progress curve will look like.

This time it's 100 days, next year will it be 110 or 200? I wonder what the shape of the curve is?

energy123• 1 year ago

It's longer than 100 days already in their preclinical testing but they took it out because the patient found a heart transplant.

They say one upcoming improvement is wireless power via skin, somehow. At the moment the rechargeable battery lasts for five hours.

Gigachad2• 1 year ago

Sounds kinda scary. So if the battery goes flat or gets disconnected you just immediately die?

symlinkk2• 1 year ago

Crazy how slow medicine progresses compared to technology.

xvector• 1 year ago

I hope it dramatically speeds up as AI improves. ASI is likely only scalable route to solving the medical issues that plague humanity.

Gigachad2• 1 year ago

I imagine the slow link is that you have to actually test stuff in the real world, on people. Who in this case could very easily die if it doesn’t work. Isn’t like programming where you can just keep whacking it until it works.

alexey-salmin• 1 year ago

Wait I thought that was blockchain

jsnider3• 1 year ago

Building an ASI that cares enough about humanity to solve our medical problems sounds much harder than actually solving them.

danparsonson• 1 year ago

I disagree - if you move fast and break things then people die. The human body is not a single well-understood system; everyone is different in subtle ways, which incidentally is why personalised medicine is becoming a thing.

symlinkk2• 1 year ago

People die if you move too slow too.

grishka• 1 year ago

Biology, and by extension medicine, only started to look like engineering in the last ~50 years because it requires serious advancements from many other fields of science. As in, you can't discover cells if you haven't invented a microscope yet. It's literally reverse engineering alien technology, in the sense that it's something that wasn't created by humans. And you can't really reverse engineer something when you don't have any tools to meaningfully interact with it and pick it apart.

interludead3• 1 year ago

It definitely feels that way, especially compared to fields like computing where progress is exponential. But with medicine, the stakes are so much higher... Every breakthrough has to go through years of testing, trials, and regulatory hurdles to make sure it's actually safe and effective

aithrowawaycomm2• 1 year ago

How do you even compare those two things? And how do you separate technology from medicine? This statement seems like pure nonsense, hinging on a slippery definition of "technology" that in some contexts means "consumer gizmos," other contexts means "computers," and in yet other contexts means "Civilization tech tree."

iancmceachern2• 1 year ago

I've worked in this industry (LVADS and artificial hearts) and met Dr. Timms personally several times.

He and his team have been working on this for decades. It's real, and good stuff.

Congratulations to the whole team, this is the culmination of decades of effort from thousands of people.

Well done

jumperabg• 1 year ago

How much power does the heart need to pump the liquid and what is it's life expectancy? Any technical specifications for a product that can work in the human body?

bufferoverflow• 1 year ago

2016: Successful heart transplant after 1374 days living with a total artificial heart

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26819291/

alpaca128• 1 year ago

Yeah, I find that confusing too. Recently I heard in a YT video with a cardiologist (Medlife Crisis) that some people in the US lived more than 4 years with an artificial heart.

The article calls it the "world’s first implantable rotary blood pump that can act as a complete replacement for a human heart", so maybe there's a difference but the article is written as if this was the first artificial heart ever which it clearly isn't.

baxtr• 1 year ago

But 100 is much more than 4!!!

tredre3• 1 year ago

The article is deliberately misleading, possibly because of a marketing spin by their source?

People have lived years with artificial hearts, this 100 days is just the record for this particular device, the BiVACOR.

bandrami• 1 year ago

I could have sworn there were artificial hearts in the 1980s, or at least news stories about them

yesco• 1 year ago

Probably this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AbioCor

They technically worked but they were expensive, painful, and basically just kept you alive on a bed. In essence they were like a more invasive version of the iron lung but required a team to maintain.

For this reason while you may have heard it used it various trials with "success" they were considered a failure in the end and rejected by the FDA. I've spoken to some people who worked on it and the feelings are pretty bittersweet.

Learning from this, Abiomed later brought a heart pump called the "Impella" to market which works to assist your heart instead of replace it. This device is cool for different reasons and can actually save peoples lives instead of merely prolong them a few years.

The new artificial heart in the OP is more sophisticated than the AbioCor, the science keeps improving.

interludead3• 1 year ago

The Jarvik-7 artificial heart was first implanted in a human patient in 1982. But those early designs were bulky, required external power sources, and were more of a temporary measure

im3w1l3• 1 year ago

The patient, who declined to be identified, was discharged from the hospital with the implant in February. A donor heart became available to be transplanted in March.

This doesn't add up to 100 days.

Maxion2• 1 year ago

Hospital discharge != implant

im3w1l3• 1 year ago

OH that makes a lot of sense thanks for explaining.

mahkeiro• 1 year ago

Carmat a French company has a total heart product for a while in Europe. In February they celebrated the 100 implants, with the longest one lasting 25 month. https://www.carmatsa.com/en/our_product/

However this is really difficult and the company is struggling financially as the market is rather limited.

johnnyanmac2• 1 year ago

Really sucks a company doing something important like this is struggling. Such kind of company shouldn't need to worry about profits because we know how profit-minded medical breakthroughs look like.

Traubenfuchs• 1 year ago

Easy to say, but who SHOULD pay for this, lenmeldy or zolgensma?

(Compared to those treatments an artificial heart is cheap.)

Those easily cost more than the average human earns in their life.

Should the public be financially burdened by outrageously expensive research and treatments for rare diseases?

When do we say, it‘s enough, your condition is not compatible with life, enjoy some palliative treatment?

stavros• 1 year ago

Health economics is a fairly large field, and there are tradeoffs everywhere. Generally, you try to maximise quality-adjusted life years gained, which for rare diseases doesn't tend to win.

If you can give one person ten good years for a million in a rare disease, you can give ten people twenty good years in a less rare disease, so those tend to get more funding.

rossant• 1 year ago

An Australian man with heart failure has become the first person in the world to walk out of a hospital with a total artificial heart implant.

So... Why don't they mention Carmat?

aithrowawaycomm2• 1 year ago

This was very unclear in the article - typically artificial hearts have external pumps and motors, the internal component is basically a fancy valve to manage flow/oxygenation correctly. But this one has an internal pump and motor, like a real heart, but with an external battery pack. (The battery currently only lasts four hours...I am too absent-minded to be trusted with this!)

This article was a bit more clear: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-12/sydney-hospital-artif...

supermatt• 1 year ago

I guess it’s to do with what is considered “artificial”? Carmat uses bovine pericardium to line blood contacting surfaces.

interludead3• 1 year ago

This is an incredible milestone! And not just for the patient, but for the future of heart failure treatment. The fact that someone was able to walk out of the hospital and live with a fully artificial heart for over 100 days is mind-blowing. Still a long way to go before these could replace transplants entirely, but the progress is undeniable

mock-possum• 1 year ago

Only to die at the stroke of midnight on the 101st day

Miraltar• 1 year ago

Or get it replaced by a donor heart ? Please read at least the subtitle before commenting

Australian man survives 100 days with artificial heart

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