NEWS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Heart doctors marvel at Canadian device.
Tiny pump could be as significant as insulin
Brad Evenson
National Post
There are hearts on film, hearts on glossy paper, and hearts literally on fire, 3-D hearts and holographic hearts and a gigantic rotating heart with neon veins that looms like death above the heads of the 40,000 cardiologists, heart surgeons, and industry players at the American Heart Association conference, the largest of its kind in the world.
Yet it is a tiny Canadian heart, no bigger than a baby's slipper, that has captured the attention of many surgeons here.
The HeartSaver was unveiled to its biggest audience yesterday. The compact pump that holds the promise of becoming Canada's greatest medical invention since insulin beats quietly in the chest of a plastic manikin as hundreds of doctors beat a path to see it.
"It's so small," marvelled Dr. Richard Penney, a Florida cardiologist. "At the hospital where I work, the ventricular assist pump is the size of a refrigerator."
Developed at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, the HeartSaver helps to pump the heart in patients who would otherwise need atransplant.
It uses a wireless "biotelemetry" system to transmit power and digital data through the skin. A revolutionary shape allows it to fit snugly inside the rib cage, next to the heart. In the $5-billion implantables market, these innovations give manufacturer World Heart Corp. a distinct edge over its much bigger U.S. rivals. "Theoretically, World Heart has by far the best machine," said Dr. Alan Tuchman, an analyst at Oscar Gruss and Son Inc. of New York. More than 540,000 people die of heart failure in North America each year, 70% from failure of the left ventricle, the thickly muscled chamber that does most of the heart's work.
About 33,000 people a year are placed on the transplant list, yet fewer than 2,700 transplants are performed because of donorshortages.
"For many people, being put on the transplant list is essentially a death sentence," said Rod Bryden, chairman of World Heart.
Few are more sensitive to this hopeless situation than Dr. Wilbert Keon, head of the Ottawa heart institute, who performed Canada's first transplants with the Jarvik-Seven artificial heart in the mid-1980s. Although promising, the Jarvik hearts caused blood clots and could not offer a patient a normal life.
Dr. Keon wanted an artificial heart that could be implanted permanently, not only in critical patients, but also in those whose hearts were just beginning to deteriorate. So in 1989, he persuaded a brilliant Kurdish immigrant, Dr. Tofy Mussivand, to help him develop such a device.
When he arrived in Ottawa, Dr. Mussivand looked at the bulky, early prototypes of ventricular pumps and asked a surgeon to implant one in a corpse. Impossible, he was told. "I'm a simple man," Dr. Mussivand said. "So to me, it seemed simple. We needed to make this device small."
During this period, medical research was changing into a business. So as Dr. Mussivand and his team worked on their biotelemetry system, a team of patent agents worked to ensure the intellectual property rights would not slip away. But by 1995, government funds were drying up and the heart institute needed at least $100-million to get a commercially viable product to market. So Dr. Keon turned to Mr. Bryden, the man behind the spectacular rise and failure of various high-tech ventures and the Ottawa Senators hockey team. He shepherded the company through public offerings on the U.S. NASDAQ exchange and the Toronto Stock Exchange, where World Heart Corp. shares traded Friday for$11, far above the 52-week low of $4.25.
Although the HeartSaver isn't scheduled for human trials until 1999, Mr. Bryden expects profits of $120 million in five years. At $67,000, the HeartSaver, which allows users to run or swim vigorously without the protruding wires that in current ventricular pumps can cause infections, costs much less than the $100,000 to $450,000 for a human-heart transplant.
However, there's no guarantee U.S. health-maintenance organizations or provincial governments will pay for such device |
