11 thoughts on “Heartless”

  2. Three years ago, Popsci ran an article on attempts to create a pulseless artifical heart. I wonder if anything came of this.

    There’s an amazing story in the piece: apparently doctors installed an LVAD in a man with no insurance and poor English skills. He fell off the map, then showed up eight months later, relatively healthy–but with no heartbeat at all. The LVAD was still working, but the rest of his heart had pretty much withered away to the point where it was only weakly fibrillating.

    If you don’t have to have the rube goldberg lub-dub mechanism, artifical hearts become vastly simpler, more reliable, and cheaper. The CW has been that the body is adapted to expect the systole/diastole, but this called that into question. It’s an interesting article.

    2. Didn’t Darth^H^H^H^H^H Dick Cheney have one of the continuous-flow devices as a LVAD before his heart transplant? I agree that they have amazing potential.

      On the medical news front, anybody heard anything more about the suspended animation ER trials are going in Pittsburgh?

    3. The work at THI on the “dual LVAD” is ongoing. They have brought in a group from Australia that had a breakthrough in miniaturizing the device so that it would be as small as an adult human heart. They are doing animal trials on a regular basis. As to when it will be in human trials, only the FDA can say. (The Aussies had hit a wall back home and had no funding. The THI group went to a local businessman and he wrote a big check to set them up in Houston. Yea, Mattress Mack!)

      They are also doing work there on growing functional hearts from stem cells. They have had a test with a cow that worked. Most stem cell work has resulted in small slabs of undifferentiated tissue. The THI technique for a human is to strip all the cells off of a pig heart, leaving the collagen structure and blood vessels behind. Then culture cardiac stem cells on the scaffolding. Then circulate epithelial cells in the blood vessels to line them. You then have a whole heart, grown from your own cells. (Collagen is not rejected, so no problems with that.) They are also looking at growing livers. Human trials expected in 5ish years.

      They envision the pumps as being stopgap until they grow you a new heart.

      1. Fascinating. The advantage of using animal donors is obvious, but I wonder if the technique would work even better if a human heart was used as the starting point? If so, I suppose a political evaluation of the donor could help avoid bleeding hearts.

        1. Pig hearts are cheap and easy to come by is what I understand, they are the right size and have similar connection points to the vascular system. Pigs are one of the main subjects of cardiac research in animals.

      2. Yeah, I remember that the heart-growers had had some sort of breakthrough with the vascularization, but I don’t remember what the breakthrough was. Do you know the details on the tech?

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