A Man Lived Over 100 Days With a Titanium Heart. What If He's the Future of Medicine?
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Millions of people around the world suffer from heart failure with not nearly enough donors to go around.
A new life-saving titanium device called the BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart (TAH) recently kept a patient alive for more than 100 days while awaiting a donor heart.
Although designed as a stop-gap device for would-be heart donor recipients, the titanium heart could be a future permanent heart replacement for those too old or sick to undergo a transplant.
Being a man with a heart of stone isn't usually a compliment, but a heart of titanium, on the other hand, might just save your life. At least that's true for one particular Australian man who lived with an artificial titanium heart while waiting for a match for a heart transplant. According to St. Vincent's Hospital Sydney in Australia, the man eventually received that heart and is recovering well.
The patient was the sixth person to ever receive the BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart (TAH), the first to do so in Australia, and also the first to live with the device for more than a month, but he didn't stop there—his titanium ticker was pumping blood for more than 100 days. That's particularly impressive as the mechanical device was initially designed as a stopgap measure as patients with heart failure wait for a donor heart—and those waiting lists can be long.According to Nature, 7 million adults live with heart failure in the U.S. alone yet only 4,500 heart transplants were performed in 2023. That leaves many millions across the globe in need of short-term solutions while waiting for a heart, and it appears BiVACOR can help in the most severe circumstances.
The five previous trials of the device, all in the United States, also were successes though they featured earlier versions of the device that weren't designed for at-home support. The first device was implanted on July 9, 2024, at The Texas Heart Institute.
'Utilizing advanced MAGLEV technology, our TAH brings us one step closer to providing a desperately needed option for people with end-stage heart failure who require support while waiting for a heart transplant,' Daniel Timms, the CTO of BiVACOR, said after the successful implantation in July.
Suitable for most men and women, this small device uses a titanium biventricular rotary pump that, as Timms describes, contains a magnetically levitated rotor that pumps blood and therefore replaces the need for the failing heart's ventricles. This MAGLEV technology ensures that there's no wear-and tear of the device, a defect that could prove fatal for someone relying on the titanium heart, or incidences of blood trauma.[WHOEVER TOP EDITS, READ THAT LAST SENTENCE. DOESNT THAT NOT MAKE SENSE? FEEL WE CAN JUST CUT]
The TAH is currently only a short-term solution for those with heart failure, but that may not always be the case. In some cases, patients who are too old or sick for a transplant could use the BiVACOR TAH as a permanent replacement. However, Nature notes that the device still needs to go through trials for such an application.
'Many end-stage heart disease patients are actually too sick to qualify for heart transplants,' heart surgeon Jacob N. Schroder, surgical director of Advanced Heart Failure at Duke, who performed the second BiVACOR TAH operation in November 2024, said in a press statement. 'Current technologies are effective for some patients but still leave others without options. Having another way to bridge a path to transplant would fill a tremendous void and truly be a lifesaver.'
For now, BiVACOR TAH is only accessible in clinical trials approved by the FDA, and the Australian implantation is part of Monash University's Artificial Heart Frontiers Program that aims to commercialize life-saving heart failure devices. BiVACOR TAH isn't quite like the flexible membranes that made up replacement hearts in the past, but its six-for-six winning streak certainly has cardiologists and surgeons around the world taking notice.
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