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Cardiovascular devices: Soft hugs for healing hearts

Nature Biomedical Engineering volume 1, Article number: 0046 (2017) Cite this article

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An implantable soft robotic sleeve restores circulation and muscle function in infarcted pig hearts.

VADs currently fall into two general categories: percutaneous devices meant for short-term use (from hours to days), and durable devices intended for long-term use (from months to years). VADs have been in the news regularly since the inception, in 1964, of the Artificial Heart Program of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). With considerable support from the NIH (ref. 2) and industry (∼US$2 billion in total since 1994, as disclosed in publicly available expenditure reports from Heartware, Thoratec and Abiomed), VADs have become smaller, more efficient, safer, more durable and easier to implant. Despite the safety and efficacy of short-term percutaneous devices in many patients, the adoption of durable VADs and TAHs has been limited to the most severely ill patients, owing to the invasiveness of the devices and to persistent risks of stroke and bleeding3. Even among this subset of severely ill patients, which numbers more than 100,000 in the US alone, VADs are used in only ∼3,000 patients each year.

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Figure 1: Design and fitting of a soft robotic sleeve to a porcine heart.

References

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  1. John C. Criscione is in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, 77843-3120, USA

    John C. Criscione

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  1. John C. Criscione
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Correspondence to John C. Criscione.

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Criscione, J. Cardiovascular devices: Soft hugs for healing hearts. Nat Biomed Eng 1, 0046 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-017-0046

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-017-0046

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