Science in Action seminar

Kelly Mesa, Sacred Heart Medical Center and Children’s Hospital, will present The pursuit of engineering the best human heart assistant.

This will be the first in a seminar series, titled “Science in Action”, aimed at informing faculty and students about real-world problems confronting technical professionals in applied science, bioengineering, and medicine. 

Abstract: The increasing incidence of heart failure raises a number of challenges in medicine, in particular the shortage of donor hearts available for transplantation.  Only about 2,500 donor hearts are available annually, so each year, approximately 40,000 patients die of heart disease that could have been treated with cardiac transplantation.    This need has led to the development of the ventricular assist device (VAD), an electromechanical device that is used to assist cardiac circulation.  Continuous flow VADs (CVADS) are currently the most widely used type of mechanical circulatory support as a bridge to transplant, and as destination therapy for end-stage congestive heart failure.  However, CVADs have been associated with gastrointestinal bleeding, arteriovenous malformations, hemolysis, pump thrombosis, aortic insufficiency, and pump failure. By contrast, the first generation of VAD pumps were pulsatile, and had their own significant shortcomings, such as noise, vulnerable bearings, and vulnerable drive systems. In this talk, I describe the emerging field of pumps and recent advances that allow us to address several medical needs, including (a) the ability to support bridge to transplant patients, (b) destination therapy patients, and (c) bridge to recovery patients.  The speaker will also discuss the engineering challenges of existing cutting-edge pumps and current research & development efforts.