A biomedical engineering team at the Cleveland Clinic is developing an implantable electric heart pump that researchers hope will become part of a substitute for heart transplants.
"Ultimately, I think something needs to be done, since donors are extremely limited," co-investigator Dr. Leonard Golding said. He said that while 25,000 to 50,000 people need heart transplants, only 2,400 surgeries were performed in the United States last year.
The researchers are funded by a five-year, nearly $7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.
The right-ventricular assist device, or RVAD, would work in tandem with the clinic's successful CorAide LVAD, a device that improves pumping in the heart's left side.
"It will open the doors for patients who are experiencing right ventricular failure. Now they are limited to staying in the hospital if they want to have any mechanical circulatory support," said Tim Baldwin, a health science administrator at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md.
In a healthy heart, oxygen-depleted blood enters through the right ventricle, where it is pumped through the pulmonary artery to the lungs to exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen. The oxygenated blood leaves the lungs, passes through the left ventricle and is pumped to the rest of the body.
The two pumps could help patients with congestive heart failure, which is when the heart muscle becomes weak and does not pump enough blood to the rest of the body.
Fluids can accumulate in the lungs and other tissues, causing coughing, fatigue and increased heart rate. About 5 million Americans have congestive heart failure, according to the American Heart Association.
Electric pumps for the right side of the heart are currently available, although they are bedside devices and require the patient to be constantly attached to a stationary machine.
The implantable pumps would allow patients to move around freely.
"It's important for them to feel like humans, to feel like there's not a cord attached all the time," Golding said.
Unlike after a heart transplant, the pumps would also not require patients to take anticoagulants or immune-suppression drugs. But because the implants are made of foreign material, they may result in complications from infection, said Dr. Kiyotaka Fukamachi, lead researcher at the clinic's Cardiovascular Dynamics Laboratory.
