• Patient in his 40s received the Australian-designed implant which acts as a bridge before donor heart

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

The Australian researchers and doctors behind the operation announced yesterday (12) that the implant had been an “unmitigated clinical success” after the man lived with the device for more than 100 days before receiving a donor heart transplant in early March.

The BiVACOR total artificial heart, invented by Queensland-born Dr. Daniel Timms, is the world’s first implantable rotary blood pump that can act as a complete replacement for a human heart, using magnetic levitation technology to replicate the natural blood flow of a healthy heart.

The implant has been designed for patients with end-stage biventricular heart failure, which generally develops after other conditions – most commonly heart attack and coronary heart disease, but also other diseases such as diabetes – have damaged or weakened the heart so that it cannot pump blood through the body effectively.

Every year more than 23 million people around the world suffer from heart failure but only 6,000 will receive a donor heart.

The implant is designed as a bridge to keep patients alive until a donor heart transplant becomes available, but BiVACOR’s long-term ambition is for implant recipients to be able to live with their device without needing a heart transplant.

The patient, a man in his 40s who was experiencing severe heart failure, volunteered to become the first recipient of the total artificial heart in Australia and the sixth in the world. The first five implants took place last year (2024) in the United States and all received donor hearts before being discharged from hospital, with the longest time in between the implant and transplant being 27 days. The Australian patient received the device on 22 November 2024 at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney in a six-hour procedure led by the cardiothoracic and transplant surgeon Dr. Paul Jansz. The patient was discharged from the Hospital with the implant in February of this year. A donor heart became available to be transplanted in March.

However, Prof. David Colquhoun from the University of Queensland and Board Member of the Heart Foundation, who was not involved in the trial, cautioned that the functioning time span of the artificial heart – more than 100 days – was still significantly less than that of a donor heart, which is more than 10 years (or 3,000 days). 

(The Guardian)