Health. Let’s hear it for the artificial heart by Jeremy Laurence

IT IS 2020, and the American media is transfixed by the story of a 33-year-old baseball player who has become the first person in the world to The athlete was two when his father died from a heart attack, and now he was found to be suffering from advanced heart disease during routine screening tests introduced for sportsmen and women in 2015. The move followed a rising toll of deaths among top-class athletes who died on the sports field as a result of undiagnosed heart conditions.
His inherited heart disease was so serious that a transplant was his only option. But instead of using a donor heart from an accident victim, specialists from the Institute for Regenerative Medicine (IRM) in North Carolina inserted an artificial heart n a fully implantable device called the Abiocor which was first used in 2009 n as a stop-gap while they repaired his own.
For six months, he lived with the artificial heart fitted alongside his existing heart, which was "rested". Scientists grew replacement heart tissue in the laboratory from stem cells taken from his bone marrow, and stitched it into the diseased left ventricle, after removing the dead and damaged tissue. The player's "remade" heart was restarted and the artificial heart removed.
The advance marks a new frontier for medicine and a world first for the IRM, which has led stem cell science and transplant medicine for more than two decades. Its first breakthrough came in 2006, when it announced the successful transplant of new bladders grown from stem cells in the laboratory into seven patients.
The institute's latest success came as a bitter disappointment to British experts from the University of Bristol who, as part of an international team, were responsible for "Claudia's trachea", the world's first successful transplant of a windpipe, grown using stem cells taken from the patient, a 30-year-old mother of two children, from Barcelona in 2008.
The British specialists predicted at the time that their advance would "transform the way we think about surgery" and that "in 20 years the commonest operations will be regenerative procedures to replace organs and tissues" with ones grown from stem cells. But their research foundered after 2011 due to a lack of funding during the squeeze on universities and cuts in NHS spending.
The potential of stem cell science has given a boost to the growing number of patients suffering organ failure. But their hopes of life-saving surgery have been dashed by a shortage of funds. The introduction of presumed consent for organ donation in 2014 failed to produce the expected boost to transplants. Adults are presumed to consent to the use of their organs after death unless they have registered their objection beforehand on a national database, but there has been no increase in transplant operations.
— By arrangement with The Independent

Source: The Tribune, Chandigarh, India.

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