Patient Survives 100 Days With Artificial Titanium Heart

This Picture provided by BiVACOR, Inc. presents the BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart (TAH) (N.d.). https://bivacor.com.

Walking out of St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, Australia, an Australian man made history after surviving over 100 days with a titanium artificial heart. This revolutionary achievement marks a massive step in saving more heart patients.

“Heart failure kills almost 5,000 Australians every year. We’ve worked towards this moment for years and we’re enormously proud to have been the first team in Australia to carry out this procedure,” said Paul Jansz, a heart surgeon who worked on the heart transplant procedure.

The titanium artificial heart, known as BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart (TAH), was created by the medical device company, BiVACOR. The BiVACOR TAH takes a new approach different from modern TAH technologies. It leverages its simple mechanics, including one motor and a single magnetically levitated rotor, to pump blood into the body. It is also an electromechanical rotary blood pump. Comparatively, current TAH technologies pump blood through the body using volume displacement pump designs with flexible polymer diaphragm.

The world’s first BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart implant occurred on 9 July, 2024 at the Texas Heart Institute at Baylor St Luke’s Medical Center in the Texas Medical Center. Since that operation, four more implants have taken place in the US.

The successful Australian implant of the TAH was the first to take place outside the US and the sixth in the world. The patient, who was experiencing severe heart failure, volunteered to become the first Australian recipient of a total artificial heart.

“It is incredibly rewarding to see our device deliver extended support to the first Australian patient. The unique design and features of the BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart translate into an unmatched safety profile, and it’s exhilarating to see decades of work come to fruition,” said Daniel Timms, the Queensland-born inventor of the world’s first durable total artificial heart and BiVACOR’s founder and Chief Technical Officer.

BiVACOR isn’t commercially available to the general public as it is still under development, but these titanium hearts may eventually serve as long-term and perhaps even permanent replacements for human hearts.