• The history of the total artificial heart is punctuated with both brilliant innovation and continual clinical failure.
• In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson funded a program to develop the first functional self-contained artificial heart.
• The first total artificial heart was implanted in 1969, but a reliable off-the-shelf version is still out of reach.
• The original goal was to replace the failing heart completely, but the goal changed to keeping the patient alive until a transplant donor could be found.
• The development of ciclosporin in the early 1980s dramatically improved the success of heart transplantation.
• Ventricular assist devices (VADs) take blood out of the ventricle of the heart and push it into the aorta at high pressure.
• Left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) have become a therapy in themselves, with survival rates of over 50 percent seen at seven years.
• Solutions for a completely implantable total artificial heart seem tantalizingly close, but no one is anticipating an easy ride.
Published February 14, 2023
Visit Nautilus to read Sian E. Harding’s original post If Technology Only Had a Heart
