Eric Berger, Houston Chronicle
The world’s elite heart surgeons have long and fruitlessly sought to develop a replacement for the muscle continually thumping inside our chests.
Could it really be, then, that a 39-year-old mechanical engineer from Australia’s Gold Coast will succeed where the luminous DeBakeys, Cooleys, Jarviks and Fraziers failed?
Some sharp people in Houston already think so. In fact, they’re betting $2.1 million that Aussie Daniel Timms is the bloke for the job. Among the believers are Dr. Denton Cooley, who founded the Texas Heart Institute 50 years ago, and Dr. Bud Frazier, a surgeon there who has transplanted more hearts than anyone in the world, and a principal in the development of multiple heart pumps and artificial hearts.
[…] There is, of course, no way to know whether Timms’ tiny, revolutionary artificial heart will ever save a life. The field of artificial hearts is seeded with failure.
[…] Timms’ device, named the BiVACOR, is smaller, and uses magnetic levitation technology to pump blood around the body. It’s unnatural, too. Hearts pump – Timms’ device delivers a continuous flow of blood. Yet when Billy Cohn first laid eyes on the instrument a year ago he knew it was special.
“People bring in suitcases all the time with these devices, and by and large it’s a lot of crap,” said Cohn, a surgeon at the Texas Heart Institute. “When Daniel came in I realized almost immediately this was the mostly highly evolved and brilliant device I’ve ever seen. I immediately told him he should move to Houston.”
But there was a snag. The institute did not have millions of dollars to move Timms and several research associates from around the world to Houston, nor pay the continued costs to refine the device for use in humans.
Cohn desperately wanted what he believed could be the world’s first successful artificial heart to be developed in his hometown of Houston. Bad enough that it might not be developed here. Worse yet, without adequate funding or facilities, the BiVACOR might never become a reality. ……So Cohn called on Mattress Mack.
(Read more of this story at Chron.com)
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