Is there an Engineer in the House?

01 Jan 2002

The recent clinical successes of artificial hearts and VADs knock over the first barrier to adoption of a new, life-saving therapy. But other hurdles remain, including providing the infrastructure to service large numbers of patients going about with extremely complicated, often quirky high-tech implantable devices on which their lives depend. The University of Pittsburgh is marshalling its bioengineering resources into a commercial entity, start-up Vital Engineering, which will be able to provide post-implant services on a wider, even global scale.

The notion that life-supporting organs could one day be replaced by machines is no longer just the stuff of science fiction. Abiomed Inc. 's AbioCor total heart replacement has now been implanted in three patients. Those events, and data from a dramatically successful trial of Thoratec Corp. 's HeartMate VE left ventricular assist device (VAD), point the way to a future in which patients will be able to go about their daily lives with the assistance of implantable devices hidden inside their bodies. Yet clinicians are only now waking up to the need to service these complex devices post-transplant.

The REMATCH (Randomized Evaluation of Mechanical Assistance for the Treatment of Congestive Heart failure) data were gathered in a pivotal...