Australian becomes first in world discharged with durable artificial heart

(ABC) -- Australia’s first durable artificial heart implant has been hailed a success after the recipient became the world’s first person to be discharged from hospital with the high-tech device.
During a 6-hour operation in Sydney last November, doctors implanted the BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart, a mechanical blood pump made out of titanium, into a man who was experiencing severe heart failure.

Daniel Timms was inspired to create the device after his father died from heart failure. (Supplied: BiVACOR)

The man received the implant as a stop-gap until a donated heart became available, but BiVACOR is designed to one day be a permanent replacement for a failing heart.
Doctors hope it could eventually negate the need for human heart donors entirely.
Renowned cardiothoracic and transplant surgeon Paul Jansz performed the operation at St Vincent’s Hospital and said it gave him “goosebumps”.
“There were definitely nerves, especially when Daniel Timms, who invented BiVACOR flicked the switch and turned it [the artificial heart] on,” Dr Jansz said.
He described the invention as “the Holy Grail”, as it technically cannot fail or be rejected by the body.
The implant pumps blood around the body using a motor with a special mechanism that avoids any mechanical wear between its parts. It uses magnets to suspend the motor’s rotor, which means the parts don’t rub or wear over time.
The device was designed by Queensland-born inventor Daniel Timms, who has dedicated his life to its creation.
Dr Timms said his interest in the idea was first sparked during childhood when he used to spend countless hours with his plumber father, tinkering with water pumps.
He said developing his invention involved many, many trips to Bunnings, which he visited with his dad every weekend.
“We had a goal between us — can we get the largest receipt at Bunnings?” he said. “We were trying to buy as much as we could to progress this along.”
Dr Timms’s father later died from heart failure, which only intensified his passion to complete the artificial heart.
He has always been determined to make sure Australians benefited from it early on.
“There’s a lot of inventions in Australia and sometimes we feel they get lost overseas,” he said.
Dr Timms said he was grateful to the patient, a man in his 40s from New South Wales, who volunteered to receive the implant while waiting for a transplant.
The man lived with the artificial heart for more than 100 days until a human heart match was found last week. His transplant surgery was also a success, and he is recovering well.
The patient was seriously unwell before receiving the BiVACOR heart.
He had trouble even walking to the toilet so was not expected to survive long enough to get a donor heart.
“A quarter of the people waiting for a transplant [used to] die — that’s changed now with devices like this,” Dr Jansz said.
Dr Timms said he expects in two to three years his artificial heart will be less of a novelty and will be implanted in more and more people.
“We just need to make more devices, that’s the only limitation right now … we are ramping up manufacturing so they are sitting on the shelf ready and waiting.”
Four more devices are due to be implanted this year through the Monash University led Artificial Heart Frontiers Program.
The BiVACOR was first implanted in a patient in July 2024 at the Texas Heart Institute, but that patient was never discharged from hospital. Since then four other patients in the US have received them before being matched with donors, but they were never discharged with the implant.
The device is small enough to fit inside a 12-year-old and weighs about 650 grams, but doctors say patients cannot feel it inside them.

(Latest Update March 13, 2025)