Nature reports on a new record from the transplant waiting list, with an Australian patient who spent 100 days waiting for a donor organ with a mechanical heart made of titanium pumping in his chest:
The man lived with the device for more than three months until he underwent surgery to receive a donated human heart. The man is recovering well, according to a statement from St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney in Australia, where the operations were conducted.
The Australian is the sixth person globally to receive the device, known as BiVACOR, but the first to live with it for more than a month.
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In all cases, the BiVACOR was used as a temporary measure until a donor heart became available. Some cardiologists say that it could become a permanent option for people not eligible for transplants because of their age or other health conditions, although the idea still needs to be tested in trials. In the United States, close to 7 million adults live with heart failure, but only about 4,500 heart transplants were performed in 2023, in part because of a shortage of donors.
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The device is a total heart replacement and works as a continuous pump in which a magnetically suspended rotor propels blood in regular pulses throughout the body. A cord tunnelled under the skin connects the device to an external, portable controller that runs on batteries by day and can be plugged into the mains at night.
Many mechanical heart devices support the left side of the heart, and typically work by pooling blood in a sack, which flexes some 35 million times a year to pump blood. But these devices have many parts and often fail. BiVACOR, which only has one moving part, will in theory experience fewer problems of mechanical wear, says Rogers.