Australian man survives 100 days with artificial heart
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
However this is really difficult and the company is struggling financially as the market is rather limited.
If you can give one person ten good years for a million in a rare disease, you can give ten people twenty good years in a less rare disease, so those tend to get more funding.
(Compared to those treatments an artificial heart is cheap.)
Those easily cost more than the average human earns in their life.
Should the public be financially burdened by outrageously expensive research and treatments for rare diseases?
When do we say, it‘s enough, your condition is not compatible with life, enjoy some palliative treatment?
Yes, precisely because they are rare and thus market forces will fail to provide a treatment.
> When do we say, it‘s enough, your condition is not compatible with life, enjoy some palliative treatment?
That will vary case by case, depending on how much the public votes in favor of socialized care vs the suffering of these people.
2. In such a case, we'd add help chip in for it. There aren't thousands of new people every day needing artificial hearts. There is certainly enough commerce in any first world country to fund such cases.
... if we could spend the same money to extend 10 lives by n years elsewhere.
It's like computers, but more life threatening :)
For this, we have insurance - to distribute the chance of utterly bad luck across all in society.
Whole (not only) western world can make such system work for a fraction of US healthcare costs, why shouldnt US?
Maybe in 5 years after some health issue or accident you will end up on sone lifelong treatment, then you may reconsider how others will help you survive.
Some Christian groups have it at the core. There's lots of those that will be happy to see others suffer.
At some point it's just playing no-true-Scotsman, while the original meaning of the word died.
When it doesn’t affect you, obviously. Maybe if some billionaire had 5 less jets, we could push medicine a little bit further and save more lives for the benefit of humanity.
Where in the world did this strange leap of logic come from? For one thing, whether most billionaires have one or more jets has nothing at all to do with medical funding (which is in any case colossal, far larger than any airplane budget of any number of billionaires).
Secondly, it's precisely the billioniares and in some cases multimillionaires who finance a lot of the more extreme tech explorations to life extension. Being fantastically rich is exceptionally conducive to wanting to live as long as possible. Any technology their funding leads to isn't going to stay bottled up for long.
More fundamentally, there seems to be a sort of odd reasoning with these arguments that if X amount of current funding for healthcare, no matter how incredibly huge, doesn't achieve Y results to fix an endless number of hard medical problems, it must be because someone is siphoning off needed funding. Considering how much funding healthcare gets already, at least allow that the problem might just be one of extremely difficult problems that won't be solved too easily regardless of how much money is thrown at them..
The reason you should want to do it if you have a functioning human soul is to lessen the suffering of others if you have the ability to do so.
So... Why don't they mention Carmat?
This article was a bit more clear: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-12/sydney-hospital-artif...
He and his team have been working on this for decades. It's real, and good stuff.
Congratulations to the whole team, this is the culmination of decades of effort from thousands of people.
Well done
The article calls it the "world’s first implantable rotary blood pump that can act as a complete replacement for a human heart", so maybe there's a difference but the article is written as if this was the first artificial heart ever which it clearly isn't.
People have lived years with artificial hearts, this 100 days is just the record for this particular device, the BiVACOR.
I wonder if they could use that as the feedback mechanism.
Ideally if the sensors are small, low power, and cheap enough CO2 and lactic acid levels would also be good to check on to increase bloodflow.
I beat there is some psychological factors to thought you don't have a beat or pulse that is probably unsettling
They did mention that one has been running continuously for two years in vitro, and the idea is for it to be reliable enough to eventually implant permanently in some situations.
I think what impresses me a lot is a smoother-running machine :)
Not to mention the erection thing.
These things seems trival and of relative importance when compared with life or death but they are still important to go back to live a normal life.
So maybe, for a temporary device, it isn’t necessary?
I wonder what the progress curve will look like.
This time it's 100 days, next year will it be 110 or 200? I wonder what the shape of the curve is?
They say one upcoming improvement is wireless power via skin, somehow. At the moment the rechargeable battery lasts for five hours.
An amazing man and amazing he made it so far in life.
Quote: He spent eighteen months in the hospital. At discharge, his parents rented a portable generator and a truck to bring him and his iron lung home. Beginning in 1954, with help from the March of Dimes and a physical therapist named Mrs. Sullivan, Alexander taught himself glossopharyngeal breathing, which allowed him to leave the iron lung for gradually increasing periods of time.
A colleague of mine required to have much metal put in his arm bones after an accident. He mentioned it always felt a bit heavy and cold. I can't imagine what this would feel like in your chest.
(https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tapestry_(episode) although, the point of the episode was, in hindsight, the fight was the correct move)
Looking at the writer's Wiki [2], he was also behind some amazing DS9 episodes like House of Quark and Rules of engagement. Gah, what happened to sci-fi? Turns out he was even the head guy on For All Mankind. Nobel Prize effect, studio pressure, what is it?
And yeah completely agreed on the various arcs in DS9. I suppose the idea of episodic content was to try to ensure that a viewer didn't feel confused/left out if they ended up missing an episode, but you can do sooo much more with arcs and anyhow, there's always the 'Last time on DS9...' intro spiel. The Dominion/Jem'Hadar/Vorta/Founders were such a memorable and somehow sympathetic (well... in part) antagonist.
Somehow thinking about that (as well as the Cardassian/Garik arcs) made me go look up the Chain of Command TNG episode [1]. And yeah, lo and behold, Ron Moore was there too. What a talent.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_Command_(Star_Trek:_T...
They technically worked but they were expensive, painful, and basically just kept you alive on a bed. In essence they were like a more invasive version of the iron lung but required a team to maintain.
For this reason while you may have heard it used it various trials with "success" they were considered a failure in the end and rejected by the FDA. I've spoken to some people who worked on it and the feelings are pretty bittersweet.
Learning from this, Abiomed later brought a heart pump called the "Impella" to market which works to assist your heart instead of replace it. This device is cool for different reasons and can actually save peoples lives instead of merely prolong them a few years.
The new artificial heart in the OP is more sophisticated than the AbioCor, the science keeps improving.
In this case, two separate mechanical hearts built on different principles hoping they would have different failure modes? Would it even be possible to hook that up correctly? Just brainstorming.
This doesn't add up to 100 days.