$2.8 Million Grant to Develop Unique Total Artificial Heart
HOUSTON (June 12, 2008) — A $2.8 million National Institutes of Health grant to the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital will fund development of a novel “pulse-less” total artificial heart.
Unlike previous heart-assist pumps that duplicated the pulse of the natural heart, this experimental device uses two small MicroMed® DeBakey VADs (ventricular-assist devices) that pump blood continuously.
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MicroMed DeBakey Ventricular Assist Device
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One of the two VADs will be dedicated to circulation of blood throughout the body and the other to blood flow to and from the lungs. Developing a way to design the pumps to automatically respond to the body’s changing needs for blood—such as during exercise—will be a key aim of the program. Continuous flow pumps are smaller, simpler and more robust than their large, complicated pulsatile predecessors.
“We have been working in this field for more than 40 years and the technical challenges inherent in developing a total artificial heart have, to date, limited its application. We are highly encouraged by the federal funding support for this effort, and we look forward to strengthening our collaborative relationships as we move forward with this research,” said principal investigator Bud Frazier, M.D., chief of Cardiopulmonary Transplantation, chief of the Center for Cardiac Support and director of Surgical Research at the Texas Heart Institute. He is chief of the Transplant Service at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital.
The Texas Heart Institute (THI) has been a leader in developing heart–assist devices, including those with a continuous flow. Heart-assist devices aid or take the place of the left ventricle, the heart’s major pumping chamber. Another small continuous flow pump, the HeartMate II, has undergone extensive testing for this purpose at the Institute. Previous work using such continuous flow pumps showed that they could keep people alive for years, even without a perceptible pulse. The John S. Dunn Research Foundation funded early feasibility studies of using two such pumps as a total heart replacement. The need for such an advance is clear.
“Heart failure is the leading cause of death in the United States. More than five million people in the U.S. have been diagnosed with heart failure and more than half a million new cases are diagnosed every year. According to the American Heart Association, the estimated direct and indirect cost of heart failure in the U.S. for 2008 is nearly $35 billion. The availability of an effective, reliable mechanical replacement for the failing human heart would have an enormous impact on health care,” said Denton A. Cooley, M.D., president and surgeon-in-chief of the Texas Heart Institute.
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Illustration of continuous flow heart pump.
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Frazier implanted the first clinically applied continuous flow pump – the Hemopump – in 1988 and has been involved in developing this unique approach to the artificial heart since then as a faculty member of the Texas Heart Institute.
“Experimental work leading to the development of an artificial heart has been in progress for almost half a century. From a practical standpoint, it remains an elusive objective,” said DeBakey. “The approach to this problem by utilizing the MicroMed VAD pump to replace the ventricles is a novel approach that theoretically has strong possibilities of working. It is gratifying that the committee evaluating this program gave it their enthusiastic support.”
The grant was awarded under the NIH Bioengineering Research Partnership, a special program to encourage collaborations among medical and engineering experts. Dr. Frazier will lead with a collaborative team from THI, MicroMed Cardiovascular, Inc., University of Houston, and Rice University.
