TRANSCRIPT
A long-term replacement for a failing human heart is regarded as one of the holy grails of modern medicine.
That may not have been achieved yet but a surgery successfully completed at Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital is being considered a significant step towards that feat.
The patient in his forties received a temporary, but lifesaving, total artificial heart transplant.
Cardiothoracic surgeon Dr Paul Jansz, who performed the operation, said the man was experiencing severe heart failure.
“He couldn't leave hospital, he wasn't going to survive to leave [to go] home. His heart kept failing, he kept coming back in. And he was one of those patients where both sides of his heart were failing, so our conventional technology would have failed him. He could have limped on but it wouldn't have been ideal. So It was certainly a game changer for him. It saved his life.”
That so-called game changer is a titanium heart created by the Australian company BiVACOR.
It's designed to keep patients alive until a donor heart transplant becomes available.
Dr Jansz described the moment it became clear the device was working.
“So that's the moment where everyone holds their breath, when it turns on and it works. Then you slowly wean the patient of the heart-lung machine that is keeping them alive while you do the surgery. And the pump takes over, and it did.”
It's not the first time the device has been implanted - five patients in the US have received it since last July.
But no-one had been discharged from hospital with the titanium heart - until now.
The Australian man received the implant in November and was discharged last month.
BiVOCAR Chief Technical officer and the inventor of the artificial heart, Daniel Timms, was with the patient when he left hospital.
“He was just in great spirits, he was just an incredibly nice guy. And the number of times he mentioned to me, I'm doing this also for more heart failure patients - If this works well then this is going to continued to be planted into more patients. And that was part of his reasoning to say yes to this sort of technology.”
His transplant cardiologist Professor Chris Haywood said the man led a relatively normal life with the artificial heart.
“His diet was fairly positive. He could go out shopping and go down the street, all those sort of things. No significant limitations in terms of his breathing.”
Last week he received a donor transplant to replace the artificial heart - doctors say he is recovering well.
Almost 5,000 Australians die of heart failure each year.
The success of the device has the medical community hoping that it will one day become a permanent replacement for a failing heart.
Daniel Timms again:
“Our mission is to make it as good as a transplant or maybe even better. heart transplantation does require anti-rejection drugs and survival at ten years is just 50 per cent at ten years. So there's an opportunity for a mechanical device to surpass that. What I have in my hands here is the first step towards doing that. And we are working as a mission to have as many unlimited, basically, heart transplants available.”
A further four Australian patients are expected to receive the device this year with clinical trials to follow.
