The BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart: A Maglev Bridge To Life

July 28, 2024 by Maya Posch 28 Comments

The BiVACOR THA hooked up with the CTO Dianiel Timms in the background. (Credit: BiVACOR)

Outside of the brain, the heart is probably the organ that you miss the most when it ceases to function correctly. Unfortunately, as we cannot grow custom replacement hearts yet, we have to keep heart patients alive long enough for them to receive a donor heart. Yet despite the heart being essentially a blood pump, engineering even a short-term artificial replacement has been a struggle for many decades. A new contender has now arrived in the BiVACOR TAH (total artificial heart), which just had the first prototype implanted in a human patient.

Unlike the typical membrane-based pumps, the BiVACOR TAH is a rotary pump that uses an impeller-based design with magnetic levitation replacing bearings and theoretically minimizing damage to the blood. This design should also mean a significant flowrate, enough even for an exercising adult. Naturally, this TAH is only being tested as a bridge-to-transplant solution, for patients with a failing heart who do not qualify for a ventricular assist device. This may give more heart patients a chance to that donor heart transplant, even if a TAH as a destination therapy could save so many more lives.

The harsh reality is that the number of donor hearts decreases each year while demand increases, leading to unconventional approaches like xenotransplantation using specially bred pigs as donor, as well as therapeutic cloning to grow a new heart from the patient’s own cells. Having a universal TAH that could be left in-place (destination therapy) for decades would offer a solid option next to the latter, but remains elusive. As shown by e.g. the lack of progress with a TAH like the ReinHeart despite a promising 2014 paper in a bovine model.

Hopefully before long we’ll figure out a reliable way to fix this ‘just a blood pump’ in our bodies, regardless of whether it’s a biological or mechanical solution.

Permanent Artificial Hearts: Long-Sought Replacements May Not Be Far Away

August 9, 2021 by Dan Maloney 44 Comments

The number of artificial prosthetic replacement parts available for the human body is really quite impressive. From prosthetic eyes to artificial hips and knees, there are very few parts of the human body that can’t be swapped out with something that works at least as well as the original, especially given that the OEM part was probably in pretty tough shape in the first place.

But the heart has always been a weak spot in humans, in part because of the fact that it never gets to rest, and in part because all things considered, we modern humans don’t take really good care of it. And when the heart breaks down past the point where medicine or surgery can help, we’re left with far fewer alternatives than someone with a bum knee would face. The fact is that the best we can currently hope for is a mechanical heart that lets a patient live long enough to find a donor heart. But even then, tragedy must necessarily attend, and someone young and healthy must die so that someone else may live.

A permanent implantable artificial heart has long been a goal of medicine, and if recent developments in materials science and electrical engineering have anything to say about it, such a device may soon become a reality. Heart replacements may someday be as simple as hip replacements, but getting to that point requires understanding the history of mechanical hearts, and why it’s not just as simple as building a pump.

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3D Printing A Real Heart

April 23, 2019 by Pedro Umbelino 12 Comments

As 3D printing becomes more and more used in a wide range of fields, medical science is not left behind. From the more standard uses such as printing medical equipment and prosthetics to more advanced uses like printing cartilages and bones, the success of 3D printing technologies in the medical field is rapidly growing.

One of the last breakthrough is the world’s first 3D vascularised engineered heart using the patient’s own cells and biological materials. Until now, scientists have only been successful in printing only simple tissues without blood vessels. Researchers from Tel Aviv University used the fatty tissue from patients to separate the cellular and acellular materials and reprogrammed the cells become pluripotent stem cells. The extracellular matrix (ECM) was processed into a personalized hydrogel that served as the basis from the print.

This heart is made from human cells and patient-specific biological materials. In our process these materials serve as the bioinks, substances made of sugars and proteins that can be used for 3D printing of complex tissue models… At this stage, our 3D heart is small, the size of a rabbit’s heart, but larger human hearts require the same technology.

After being mixed with the hydrogel, the cells were efficiently differentiated to cardiac or endothelial cells to create patient-specific, immune-compatible cardiac patches with blood vessels and, subsequently, an entire heart that completely matches the immunological, cellular, biochemical and anatomical properties of the patient. The difficulty of printing full-blown organs were being tackled for a long time and we already talked about it in the past.

The development of this technology may completely solve both the problem of organ compatibility and organ rejection.

Building An Artificial Heart With Ferrofluids

March 27, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 61 Comments

Here’s something we thought we’d never see on Hackaday. [Chris Suprock] is developing an artificial heart he calls Steel Heart. It’s an artificial heart powered by electromagnets and ferrofluids.

The idea behind [Chris]’ artificial heart is ingenious in its simplicity. An elastic membrane is stretched across a frame and a magnetic liquid (or ferrofluid, if you prefer) is poured across the membrane. An electromagnet is activated and the membrane stretches out, simulating the beating of a heart. Put a few of these together and you’ve got a compact, biologically inert pump that’s perfect for replacing an aging ticker.

[Chris]’ plan to use ferrofluids and electromagnets as an artificial heart give us pause to actually think about what he’s done here. Previously, artificial hearts used either pneumatics or motors to pump blood throughout the body. Pneumatic pumps required plastic tubes coming out of the body – not a satisfactory long-term solution. Motor-driven pumps can rupture red blood cells leading to hemolysis. Using ferrofluids and an elastic membrane allows for the best of both worlds – undamaged blood cells and transdermal induction charging.

Not only is [Chris] designing a freaking artificial heart, he also came up with a useful application of ferrofluids. We were nearly ready to write off magnetic particles suspended in a liquid as a cool science toy or artistic inspiration. You can check out [Chris]’ indiegogo video with a demo of the ferrofluid pump in action after the break.

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