An Australian man has become the first in the world to be discharged from hospital with a total durable artificial heart implant. Doctors are hailing the success of the procedure, with the device keeping him alive for more than 100 days, until a human donor heart could be implanted.
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00:00So, how's the patient doing?
00:03Well, the patient's doing really well.
00:05As you said, this device was being used sort of as a stopgap measure to assist them in
00:09getting to a human heart transplant, but it's hoped that eventually these new devices could
00:15be actually used instead of human hearts to keep patients alive indefinitely.
00:20Tell us a bit more about the device itself then.
00:22What's it made of?
00:23So, it's made of titanium and it's this sort of heavy metal silver device.
00:27It sort of looks almost like a spare part for a car, but it's quite incredible the way
00:31it works.
00:32It doesn't have parts that rub together, so it uses magnetic levitation to pump the blood
00:37around the body into the lungs.
00:38So, that means it's not going to wear out, so that's the durable aspect of it and it's
00:42hoped that that will allow them to be used very long term in patients going into the
00:46future.
00:47So, what was the inspiration for the Australian inventor who came up with this?
00:51Yeah, well, Dr. Daniel Timms was a biomedical engineer and his father had heart failure.
00:57So, his father was also a plumber, so he worked with his dad on pumps and things like that
01:02when he was younger and when he found out that he had this illness, he was inspired
01:06to create this device, but it's taken more than 20 years to get there.
01:10He sort of worked day and night, especially when his dad was really ill, hoping to get
01:14this finished.
01:15So, this Australian is the first Australian to be implanted with it, but there has been
01:19five other Americans that have had the heart transplant with the total artificial heart,
01:24but didn't leave the hospital.
01:26So, this is the first time that a patient has left the hospital and been kept alive
01:29with this for over 100 days.
01:32Are there more transplants scheduled soon?
01:35Well, very much.
01:36They're hoping that as part of a program in Australia that's been funded by the government
01:40with $50 million, that they'll be able to do at least four more transplants like this
01:45in the coming years, sorry, within the next 12 months, and see how long these are able
01:51to keep people going for, but at the moment we have a real problem with a lack of organ
01:55donors in Australia.
01:56Last year there was a decrease in the number of heart transplants that were actually performed
02:00with human hearts.
02:01It was down almost 19% the year before, so the message really is we still desperately
02:05need people to sign up to be organ donors in order to keep people with heart failure alive.
02:10So for now, the idea is that the artificial heart will keep people going until a human
02:15heart is available for transplant, but beyond that, you know, who knows, maybe the artificial
02:21heart will be the transplant itself.
02:22Well, that's the moonshot, the holy grail that researchers have been talking about for
02:26decades and they're now hoping within the next 10 years that could in fact be a possibility.