New Artificial Heart Ready For Implantation

Roger Mezger

Newhouse News Service

At this moment, for the first time in 15 years, a permanent artificial replacement heart might be pumping in a human's chest.

The manufacturer of the 2-pound device, made of flexible plastic and titanium and named AbioCor, has said that it hopes to start clinical trials before the end of June.

But don't expect to hear much about this historic event until well after the fact. A 30-day news blackout will hide from the public pertinent details of the first implant --- including the condition of the seriously ill patient who makes it possible.

The implant will mark the first U.S. attempt to extend life with a permanent artificial heart since the government, concerned about problems with the crude, cumbersome Jarvik-7, pulled the plug on long-term use of that technology in 1984.

This initial phase of AbioCor clinical trials is sure to raise some medical, ethical and economic issues: about the quality of life the first patients can expect, about AbioCor's reliability and about whether it is needed at all, given other therapies that are options for most heart patients.

Dr. Louis Samuels, who teaches cardiothoracic surgery at MCP Hahnemann University in Philadelphia, said it is ''very possible'' that the first implant of the grapefruit -sized AbioCor will happen by June 30.

Samuels heads a team at Hahnemann Medical Center that is trained to implant the heart. Teams at medical centers in four other cities --- Boston, Louisville, Houston and Los Angeles --- also are trained and waiting.

The five centers have signed on with Abiomed Inc., a publicly held Massachusetts biotechnology company that built the heart, to conduct the trials. Abiomed's share price has more than doubled, to around $25, since April.

When and where that first implant takes place depends solely on a dying heart patient near one of the trial sites agreeing to become part of the experiment.

Doctors will pick a willing patient who ''is on death's door,'' Samuels said --- someone they believe has no more than 30 days to live, is too sick for a transplant and has no other options.

Quality of life is a key concern this time, thanks to the Jarvik-7 experience. Barney Clark, 61, a retired Seattle dentist dying of heart failure, received the first Jarvik-7 in 1982. Then, people older than 50 were considered too old for heart transplants. Today, people much older than Clark was routinely receive new hearts.

Clark lived 112 days on the device, few of them pleasant. Six-foot-long tubes passed through his skin to connect the air-driven Jarvik-7 to a noisy power source the size of a dishwasher. He endured pain, depression, seizures, infections and organ failure.

AbioCor proponents say it will be much different this time. Because no tubes will protrude, infection won't have an easy way to enter the body.

Copyright © 2000 Cox Interactive Media.

This article posted September 26, 2001.