‘Complete game changer’: Man leaves Sydney hospital with artificial heart in world first

An Australian patient has become the first in the world to leave hospital with a levitating titanium heart, in a major step towards halving deaths from cardiac failure and establishing a world-leading medical manufacturing industry on Australian soil.

The ambitious procedure, performed in November, was announced as an “unmitigated clinical success” on Wednesday, after the man in his 40s, who has chosen not to be identified, survived long enough with the device to receive a conventional heart transplant earlier this month.

Dr Daniel Timms, inventor of the BiVacor total artificial heart, at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute on Wednesday.Credit: Kate Geraghty

The man, a patient at St Vincent’s in Darlinghurst, was experiencing severe heart failure and would not have survived without the implant.

It was the first time the BiVacor total artificial heart implant, devised by Queenslander Daniel Timms more than 20 years ago, had been implanted in a patient in Australia. Four patients have received the implant in the United States since July, but this was the first time anyone left the hospital with the device in place.

“This is a complete game changer,” said Dr Paul Jansz, the cardiothoracic surgeon who installed the implant in a six-hour surgery. “It’s a device that solves a lot of the problems that we have with mechanical circulatory support.”

With the device implanted, the man left hospital in February in an Uber with Timms, who had flown over from the US to be by his side.

“He was asking, you know, maybe we can go for a pint sometime … he was just in great spirits,” Timms said at a media conference on Wednesday. “If this works well, then this is going to continue to be implanted in more patients. And that was part of his reasoning to say yes to this kind of technology.”

The man spent more than 100 days with the device in place, the longest of any recipient so far.

Timms said the man could not feel the heart inside his chest, and was able to walk down the street and go shopping in the month before he received his donated heart.

He is now recovering well in hospital from the conventional transplant, his doctor at St Vincent’s, Professor Chris Hayward, said.

BiVacor founder Daniel Timms (centre) with St Vincent’s Hospital Professor Chris Hayward, a heart failure and transplant cardiologist, and Dr Paul Jansz, the cardiothoracic surgeon who implanted the device.Credit: Kate Geraghty

How we got here

Daniel Timms began developing an artificial heart as an engineering student in the early 2000s after his father, Gary, a plumber, had a heart attack.

Gary was the first to see his outlandish designs, and the pair built the first prototypes on their kitchen bench in Brisbane, with pieces of piping bought from Bunnings.

Timms finished his PhD in 2005. Six months later, Gary’s condition deteriorated rapidly. He died in a Brisbane hospital, aged 55. In 2008, Timms founded BiVacor alongside Dr Billy Cohn, a cardiothoracic surgeon at the Texas Heart Institute.

Timms has been based in California for most of the past 17 years, travelling across the world in his pursuit of a heart that could keep pumping, in the words of Cohn, “until the earth spins into the sun”.

A chequered history of success

A viable long-term replacement for the human heart is considered one of the holy grails of medicine.

Surgeons in the US achieved the first successful artificial heart implant in the 1980s, but it wasn’t until 2010 that Australia had its first breakthrough – also at St Vincent’s.

The human heart beats, on average, 70 times per minute, or 37 million times a year. It’s a feat no engineer has been able to replicate over the long term.

As such, artificial hearts have only been used so far as a bridge to transplantation, keeping the patient alive until they can receive a heart transplant.

Even then, a transplanted heart typically only lasts around a decade, in which time the recipient’s immune system is suppressed to reduce the chances of the body rejecting the organ.

How it works

Researchers hope BiVacor’s artificial heart will one day eliminate the need for heart transplants.

Its design has one moving part – a spinning disc floating inside a compact titanium chamber. The chamber is small enough to fit inside women and children, and its wider chambers and self-lubricating system dramatically reduce the chances of clotting and stroke.

Suspended by Maglev technology, it does not suffer wear and tear. The spinning disc can adjust the rate of blood flow to pump faster when we exercise and slower at rest – something no other mechanical heart has achieved. Eventually, Timms says, power will be transferred to the device across the skin – “like charging an iPhone”.

Timms said these changes would be rolled out in the next six years, with the hope of making it a viable alternative to transplantation.

What’s next

The implant is the first in a series of procedures planned under the Artificial Heart Frontiers Program, led by Melbourne’s Monash University.

The program is funded by a $50 million grant from the federal government’s Medical Research Future Fund, of which $17.5 million was allocated towards the BiVacor trial. Two other devices – a miniature heart pump and a left ventricular assisted device – are also being trialled and developed.

Announcing the funding last February, Health Minister Mark Butler said the technology could halve deaths from heart failure, and establish Australia as a leading manufacturer of medical devices.

“This is an incredible story of Australian ingenuity and sovereign manufacturing, with collaboration across universities, clinical hospitals and industry to develop the world’s most advanced artificial heart,” he said.

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