This story was first published in digitalhealth.net
UK’s first artificial heart pump due to trial in 2018
The UK’s first heart pump is a step closer to being used on patients, scientists have said.
Swansea University’s Institute of Life Science 2 has been developed by Calon Cardio, and clinical trials are expected to begin in late 2018 with the aim of properly being introduced and used in the UK two years later.
The pump is commonly known as a ventricular assistant device (VAD), although this particular one is called a MiniVAD.
The pump is implanted into the failing heart and is expected to last about 10 years. It is then driven by an embedded electric motor and powered by a battery pack worn by the user.
Stuart McConchie, chief executive of Calon Cardio, said: “This is for a very sick group of people and there are millions of them in the world, and hundreds of thousands in the United Kingdom. It is the first British pump to be built for this purpose: to treat blood which is flowing through the pump extremely gently and not to do any damage to the blood.
"There are other pumps that have been built that do cause some damage to the blood and, as a result, patients have adverse events that diminish the impact of the implantation and the treatment. Reliability of these pumps has been established for several years but blood handling is a problem. If they break up red blood cells or white blood cells or damage proteins then there is a cost of that."
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