This "Fake" Heart Saved a Life

• The story of Barney Clark, the first human to receive an artificial heart in 1982.
• A revolutionary artificial heart in 2025 allows a patient to leave the hospital without a human heart.
• The Bvekor Total Artificial Heart marks a significant advancement in medical technology.
• Insights into the inventors and technology behind this groundbreaking device.
• Future prospects for the artificial heart and its potential to replace human heart transplants.

Hi, welcome to another episode of Cold Fusion.
The person you see in this image is Barney Clark. In 1982, he became the first human ever to receive an artificial heart. It was an experimental and risky endeavor, fraught with complications. He went on to live 112 days, or about four months after the transplant. But he needed the best doctors of the nation intensely close monitoring. And his heart was powered by a machine the size of a small refrigerator.

Now fast forward to 2025 in Australia and a patient walks out of hospital with no human heart in their chest. It's a moment in medical history. A man from New South Wales becoming the first in the country to receive an artificial heart. The Australian invented device was used as a bridge to human transplant, but it has the potential to be permanent, saving many lives. It was a total artificial heart with no need for an external pump or a backpack like the one seen here.

The 2025 artificial heart is a true example of the extent humans go to in the pursuit of innovation. In this episode, we'll take a look at the case, the team behind it, and finally, what it means for humans around the world in similar situations. But before we get started, just for your information, Cold Fusion episodes are now available on Spotify, so you can watch them there if you prefer.

You are watching Cold Fusion TV. It's November 2024 in Sydney, Australia. Over at St Vincent Hospital, a very ill man is wheeled into the operating theatre as his heart was failing him. The patient was extremely unwell and wasn't expected to survive long. Even though the patient was only in his 40s, he struggled to even walk to the toilet. His case was pretty dire.

25% of patients waiting for a heart transplant sadly pass away. While waiting, heart transplant surgeon Paul Jans is assigned to the task of helping change this man's fate. What he's about to do is special. The operation lasted six hours and Dr. Paul, who usually has nerves of steel, was nervous this time. He would later state that the operation gave him goosebumps. Why? Because Dr. Paul is going to implant a new technology called the Bvekor Total Artificial Heart. The device was switched on by its inventor, Daniel Tims, and when it began pumping blood, it was a remarkable moment.

The patient recovered very well and was discharged from the hospital. Dr. Paul states that these devices technically can't fail or be rejected by the human body. As he describes it, this is the holy grail of artificial hearts. The Sydney patient lived with the artificial heart for over 100 days before finding a donor heart. Overall, the surgery has been hailed a massive success.

Our story of the new artificial heart starts with Daniel Tims. He came from Queensland, Australia. Daniel's father was a plumber. And as a child, he was used to tinkering around with mechanical pumps and valves. A skill set that would prove invaluable later in life. In Australia, we have a hardware store called Bunnings. It's similar to Lowe's in the US. And Bunnings was Daniel's second home. He would develop his inventions, traveling there with his dad every weekend.

Daniel would later recount to the ABC Australia: "We had a goal between us. Can we get the largest receipt at Bunnings? We were trying to buy as much as we could to progress this thing along." End-stage heart failure affects 26 million people worldwide annually. So when it struck Daniel's father, his life was altered forever. From this point, Daniel would dedicate his life into figuring out how to make sure that no one else would have to go through what he went through ever again.

Out of the tens of millions of people that suffer from heart failure yearly, only 6,000 will receive a donor heart. So a new technology breakthrough in this field would be massive. The first artificial heart to be successfully implanted into a human was the Jarvik 7 in 1982. It was very crass, and although the patient did live for another 112 days, he was tethered to a pump weighing 400 pounds, or about 180 kilograms.

But the extra life he received was sadly full of suffering. He endured more operations, seizures, internal bleeding, and extended periods of confusion. It was so bad that he asked to die multiple times. Now, contrast this with the Bivocar heart of 2024. To begin, it's much simpler than others on the market because it has only one moving part. But we'll get to this later. It's small and portable, only needing a small external controller with a rechargeable battery.

And this connects to the heart via a wire in the patient's chest. In other words, the patient is finally free from big and bulky external pumps or power sources. It's an incredibly easy device. You stitch those to the atria, as I said, and then you literally click the pump in and then hand off this drive line and turn it on. So that's a sort of a moment where everyone holds their breath, but it turns on and it works.

And then you slowly wean the patient off the heart-lung machine which is keeping them alive while you do the surgery, and the pump takes over. The device is so small that it can fit in the chest cavity of a 12-year-old, and it weighs only 650 grams. Doctors say that the patients can't even feel the device inside of them.

The Bivocar heart was first implanted in a patient in July of 2024. Since then, four other patients in the US have been implanted with the device, using it until they received a donor heart. But in all of these cases, the patients were never discharged with the implant. So the Sydney patient made headlines because he was the first to be released from hospital with the titanium heart. Initially developed as a stopgap for patients who are waiting for a donor heart, the long-term vision for this device is to be a permanent replacement for the human heart. Eventually, this device could replace human heart transplants altogether.

Not only are there not enough donor hearts, 50% of patients will die after 10 years from rejection of that heart. So, okay, that all sounds pretty cool, but how does it work? Let's start with current artificial heart technologies. They usually use a volume displacement pump design. But instead of mimicking the complicated pumping motion of a heart, wouldn't it be simpler to just have a constant flow? Well, that's where the rotary blood pump comes into play.

There's only one motor and a single magnetically levitated rotor. This system simultaneously pumps blood to both the body and the lungs. It can deliver 12 litres per minute. That's enough blood flow for an exercising adult male. In addition, the blood flow is adaptable to the patient's activity via a smart controller.

There's no valves, no flexing pumping chambers, no mechanical bearings to wear out. And it's made of titanium, meaning that it's friendly to the body and doesn't corrode. Interestingly, what sets this artificial heart apart from others is the maglev technology, the very same technology used in high-speed trains. The rotor within the system is magnetically levitated to avoid all wear and virtually all friction.

The advantage of this, apart from being vastly more durable, is that it uses much less power than other methods while maintaining high blood flow. No mechanical wear means the device won't break. And that's the most important thing, as you can imagine for an artificial heart and something that's plagued the industry for the last 60 years. If you just have one spinning, rapidly spinning disk that's magnetically levitated, there's no mechanical wear. There's no opportunity for the device to fail at any particular time.

And so that's the big difference between this technology and others that have come before. Now that is what I call engineering. The immediate future of this device is to be implanted in four more patients through 2025. Cardiologist Chris Hayward at St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, said that the demonstration of this artificial heart proved that the device can be an alternative for those who would otherwise die while waiting for a donor heart. He tells the Guardian, "Within the next decade, we will see the artificial heart becoming the alternative for patients who are unable to wait for a donor heart, or when a donor heart simply isn't available."

Dr. Tim, inventor of the device, is pretty bullish on the technology. "Obviously, we just need to make more devices. That's the only limitation. Now we're ramping up manufacturing, so they are sitting on the shelf ready and waiting." He thinks that in a matter of three years, the artificial heart will be implanted in many more people, and again with the eventual goal of completely replacing the human heart.

Of course, it's still an early technology, so the costs are naturally going to be high. Currently, the artificial heart is selling for 200,000 Australian dollars. So I don't need to tell you how amazing this is. A portable, simple design for a heart transplant that works so well that the patients don't even feel it within their body. While this is simply astonishing, we have to temper expectations.

Professor David Collicorn from the University of Queensland gives his independent comments to the Guardian. He called it a great technological step forward for artificial hearts, bridging hearts before transplant. But there were words of caution. He postulates that the artificial donor heart lasts around 3,000 days, or about 10 years. But 100 days for this new titanium heart is a far distance from those numbers. In his words, "We have a long way to go until the artificial heart matches up with the resilience of a regular heart transplant."

To lightly counter that, nobody actually knows how much longer the patient would have survived if he had to continue waiting to receive a donor heart. Who knows, it could have been another thousand days. But regardless, if this is where we are now, imagine how the technology would be in another 10 years. Perhaps heart failure could largely be a thing of the past, at least to begin with, for those who can afford it.

But with all technologies, once perfected, the task then becomes reducing the price. So that's where we are with the state of the art in heart transplant technology. Super interesting stuff. Hey, if you watch this episode and you are fascinated by the science and engineering aspect of it, I have something that you'll love.

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Anyway, my name is Daggogo and you've been watching Cold Fusion, and I’ll catch you again soon for the next episode. Cheers, guys. Have a good one. Cold Fusion — it's new thinking.