Biomedical engineer Daniel Timms lost his father to heart disease, but their kitchen-top tests helped him hone a radical idea.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.One day this may be one of those eureka stories everybody knows, like Newton and his apple; Fleming and his Petri dish; the Wright brothers and their aeroplane. Daniel and his dad’s plumbing. Because that’s where Daniel Timms’ BiVacor total artificial heart began: in a backyard in Ferny Hills, Brisbane, filled with ponds and water fountains, built on the weekends by a small blond-haired boy and his dad, a plumber.
Even if you’re lucky enough to get one, heart transplant itself is no picnic. Recipients must take a daily cocktail of drugs, including powerful immunosuppressants, which are toxic. They make you vulnerable to infection, they can contribute to illnesses including cancer, and they are a significant part of the reason that heart transplant has only a 50 per cent survival rate after 10 years. You can have a second transplant, but then the odds are even worse.
Haskell Karp, recipient of the first artificial heart implant, the Liotta-Cooley heart, recovering from surgery in 1969. Previously, the device had only been tested on seven animals. Karp survived 64 hours until a human heart transplant became available, but died 32 hours later.This heart was air-powered, connected by plastic hoses to a controller the size of a chest freezer, and made of two small chambers of rubbery plastic.
Renowned heart surgeon Billy Cohn, now BiVacor’s chief medical officer: “This thing will pump until the Earth spirals into the sun!”“We’ve got eight of these, two years on, without a failure,” Billy Cohn, now chief medical officer of BiVacor, explained during his presentation, his drawl even more pronounced than usual in his excitement. “We have one pump that’s been pumping for five years.
To solve it, the AHFP has gathered what it hopes is an Avengers-style team of experts. As well as nationally recognised cardiologists David Kaye and Professor Christopher Hayward from St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney, there are people such as Griffith University associate professor Michael Simmonds, an expert on the way blood responds when it flows through man-made materials instead of living tissue.
Before long, however, Fraser was a convert to what Billy Cohn in Texas has called “the cult of Daniel Timms”. Today, he points out that he hasn’t had anything to do with BiVacor for “years and years”. But back in the day, Fraser helped Timms – who’d been given a stipend and a single room for research at Prince Charles while still a PhD student – with access to the institutions and networks of medicine.
Thanks to this design, the BiVacor has much larger spaces for the blood to flow than other artificial hearts – which means there’s fewer places for clots to form, and less likelihood of blood cells being “smashed up” by the mechanism itself. Some blood does leak around the edges of the floating disc but this, according to key engineers on the project, is “a design feature, not a bug.
In 2006, Timms implanted his device into a sheep, showing it was workable. Soon afterwards, Gary became very ill. Timms was about to go to Europe to talk to pump engineers in Germany. As he toldmagazine, he asked his dad if he should go. “You’ve got to get there,” said Gary Timms. “This is what we’ve been working for.”
Rather prosaically, he’s back in Australia because he has to renew his US visa. American optimism, capital and appetite for risk has allowed him to refine BiVacor’s design in the past decade; to test it in live animals ; and to work towards the moment it can finally be placed in a person. This moment, in other words. As he told, this project has consumed his life. He hasn’t married or had children: “I’ve been stuck on this.”And of course, the work isn’t over yet.
Jansz has performed a number of first implants of devices. “And there are always a lot of nervous engineers, a lot of people in the room. I’m sure Daniel will be there, going, ‘Oh, can you check that stitch?’ ”
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