From backyards to operating theatres: Daniel Timms is up for The Australian’s Australian of the Year

The long road to the invention of Daniel Timms’s titanium heart has forged the native Queenslander into an exemplar for medical innovators.

BiVACOR titanium heart inventor Daniel Timms. Picture: Jane Dempster

When biomedical engineer Daniel Timms set out to create an artificial heart, his prototypes were relegated to hospital backrooms and the backyard of his Queensland home.

It is a stark contrast from his achievements in 2024, when he revolutionised the field of heart failure, saw wide success through his first medical trials, received one of the largest grants ever provided by the Medical Research Future Fund, and paved the way for a string of historic surgeries.

With another bumper year on the horizon, Dr Timms’s invention has brought him to the esteemed company that comes with a nomination for The Australian’s Australian of the Year award.

Dr Timms founded BiVACOR in 2008 and his work reached a culmination in 2024, with the transplant of the world’s first long-functioning artificial heart into a patient. He then replicated this feat five more times across Australia and the US.

Closing out the year, the American Food and Drug Administration announced it had deemed the invention’s early feasibility study a success and rubber-stamped an expansion of the study to 15 more patients.

The BiVACOR titanium heart invented by Daniel Timms. Clinical trials of the artificial heart are expected to provide a long-awaited breakthrough for people with heart failure. Picture: Jane Dempster

Previously a nominee for Queensland’s Australian of the Year, Dr Timms’s recognition swelled in the past 12 months after the Albanese government announced it would inject $50m into his project in an effort to keep “the next cochlear” from being lost to American investors.

His journey to the “Manhattan Project of heart surgery” began in 2001 as a fledgling engineering student determined to see whether he could invent something capable of keeping his father alive in the years after a heart attack.

Dr Timms and his father, Gary, spent countless afternoons trying to puzzle out their blueprint in large-scale with PVC piping.

While BiVACOR is now flush with prospective investors, Dr Timms spent much of its prototyping without recognition from the medical fraternity. For periods, he was couch-surfing, and the punishing hours he spent trying to puzzle out the mechanics of his invention were matched by his fruitless appeals for potential backers to give his idea a chance.

The BiVACOR titanium heart powers a centrifugal pump through magnetic fields. Renowned for its elegance, it offers tangible hope to those languishing on donor waiting lists and in need of a permanent solution.

Heart failure kills a person every three hours nationally.

The invention, if successful and made widely available, would provide an opportunity to thousands of Australians at risk of heart failure. It undercuts the need for a donor heart, which is subject to lengthy waits and saddles successful patients with a lifetime on immuno­suppressants.

It is far more compact than existing heart pumps, and is the only model capable of replacing all four chambers of the human heart.

“We see this as the next cochlear,” venture capital fund One­Venture’s founder Paul Kelly said. “It takes time, but this is the most exciting innovation in decades to come out of Australia.”

Dr Timms estimates the titanium heart could be available as early as 2025, provided testing is fruitful.

He has given a second lease on life to the first cohort to live without a pulse.

To nominate the 2024 Australian of the Year, email [e-mail]. Please include your name and contact details (this information is collected solely for this award and will not be used for any other purpose). The winner will be announced on Saturday, January 25, 2025.