Heart Failure Foundation chairman Peter Houghton, who five years ago became the first person in the world to be fitted with a heart pump to treat advanced heart failure.
Rather then funding academic researchers to work on disparate aspects of the project, the charity pulled together the expertise, technology and work plan that will be needed, into a single package. It then went prospecting around UK universities to find a development and commercialisation partner, eventually choosing the Institute of Life Sciences at Swansea University, Wales.
The inspiration behind the project is Peter Houghton, chairman of the Heart Failure Foundation, who in 2000 became the first person in the world to be fitted with a pump for the long-term treatment of advanced heart failure.
The ‘left ventricular assist device’ has served him well, he told delegates at the BioWales 2006 conference in Cardiff last week. “I’ve lived for five years, nine months and three days like this, and it has never gone wrong once.”
Although reliability may not be an issue, inserting the pumps requires major surgery on patients who are already seriously debilitated by end stage heart failure. The heart must be opened and a section of rib removed to accommodate the device. Around 40 per cent of recipients do not survive the operation.
A second operation is required to wire the power supply through the side of the head, and the pump is driven by lithium batteries that are carried around in a bag of about the size of a professional camera bag.
The other drawback is cost – the handcrafted pumps are £40,000 each.
“Although this second generation pump is robust and is not prone to causing infection, these drawbacks mean it is not widely used, “ said Houghton. “We need a third generation pump.”
The Holy Grail is a pump that is as robust as the earlier model, but is as easy to insert as a stent or a pacemaker. It must be easy to manufacture, to reduce costs through economies of scale and allow more people to have the implant.
Houghton said there would be a huge market for such a device. In the UK alone there are 30,000 people (of whom 12,000 are under 50), suffering from cardiomyopathy at any one time. It is estimated that a third of them could live significantly longer with the help of a pump.
“We don’t do pure research, but we do have expertise on tap, “ said Houghton. The charity has pulled in the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, UK, where Houghton had his pump inserted, and another leading clinical centre, the Texas Heart Institute in Houston, US. “We chose Swansea University to develop the pump, not only because of the technical capabilities, but because they were not afraid of doing new things.”
A new company, Heart Sciences International (HSI) Ltd, set up to run the project, is near to closing a £5 million venture capital funding round. This will give it the means to follow the road map set out by the Heart Failure Foundation of developing a prototype over the next 12 months and carrying out clinical trials in the two years after that.
“It will take three years to get the new pump technology out to the market and make it work,” said Houghton. “Really our role has finished.”
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