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A surgeon and an engineer hope this tiny pump will extend the lives of kids with heart problems

By Roger Fillion, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published December 12, 2007 at 12:05 a.m.

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Robin Shandas, professor of mechanical engineering at the UCD School of Medicine, holds heart pump prototype.

Photo by Ahmad Terry / The Rocky

Robin Shandas, professor of mechanical engineering at the UCD School of Medicine, holds heart pump prototype.

Robin Shandas holds a large-scale prototype of the artificial heart pump in his lab. The device, now in the developmental stage, would be for children born with only one ventricle.

Photo by Ahmad Terry / The Rocky

Robin Shandas holds a large-scale prototype of the artificial heart pump in his lab. The device, now in the developmental stage, would be for children born with only one ventricle.

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An engineer and a surgeon are working together to repair children born with broken hearts - truly broken hearts.

Robin Shandas and Francois Lacour-Gayet are developing an artificial pump for kids who enter life with only one heart pump, or ventricle, instead of two.

The duo want to extend the lives of these kids, who currently rely on a surgical procedure that's not a 100 percent long-term fix.

Shandas is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine, among other titles, and Lacour-Gayet is a heart surgeon at Children's Hospital in Aurora.

Their pump would substitute for the right ventricle, the one that pumps de-oxygenated blood from the heart to the lungs.

There, the blood gets fresh oxygen before the left ventricle pumps the blood out to the body.

Adult heart pumps exist to help the left ventricle. The pump has roots in NASA's space shuttle program - in particular, a fuel-injection pump.

But pumps don't exist for the right ventricle for children born missing a ventricle.

The new device - which weighs just a few ounces and resembles the propeller on a large ship - would suck the blood from a child's heart up toward the lungs. A tiny electromagnetic motor would power the device, which is still in the developmental phase.

“It's going to act as a second chamber to your heart,” said Shandas, who is also director of UCD's new center for bioengineering. “It looks very simple. But the design of it is much more complicated.”

The estimated installation cost is $50,000-plus, excluding later support and equipment costs for operating and maintaining the pump.

The pump would be installed in children when they reach the age of about 15, or once a child's heart has completed most of its growth. It could serve them for the rest of their lives or support a patient until a donor heart is available for transplant. An estimated two of every 1,000 babies are born in the United States with a single ventricle.

Until now, surgery has been used to fix the heart. The single ventricle is surgically crafted to serve double duty as the left and right ventricle. But patients may later require a transplant. The procedure, known as the Fontan operation, was developed in the 1980s.

Questions have been raised about the patients' well-being in later life.

“When they reach 40 years of age, we wonder if they are going to do well,” said Lacour-Gayet, chief of cardiac surgery at Children's Hospital and a professor of surgery at the UCD School of Medicine.

He worked on such a pump in Europe before coming to Colorado in 2002. Here, he teamed with Shandas to perfect the technology. “I told him about the idea of developing an artificial right ventricle,” Lacour-Gayet said.

A collaboration was born. Lacour-Gayet provides the medical input while Shandas provides the engineering know-how.

The two meet regularly. They also speak by phone, and Lacour-Gayet sometimes walks to Shandas' lab on the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora to see how work on the prototype is progressing.

They plan to test a titanium prototype in animals in about six months and hope to bring the pump to market in about five years.

“The regulatory hurdles are quite significant for this kind of device,” Shandas said. It will require approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

Shandas used a computer simulation to design the pump and test its ability to draw blood from the heart. He experimented with several designs and sizes to get the required suction action just right.

“We've been able to design the prototypes virtually,” he said.

Details of the device

* What: Artificial pump for children born with only one heart ventricle

* Number of U.S. babies born with one ventricle: two in every 1,000

* Estimated installation cost: $50,000-plus, excluding later support and equipment costs for operating and maintaining pump

* Next step: Prototype to be tested in animals

* Availability: Developers hope to bring pump to market in five years.

Comments

  • December 17, 2007

    1:26 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    awilliams8 writes:

    As a parent of a child who has a heart condition that this would help her, I feel confident in this becoming a sucess. Also knowing that Francois Lacour-Gayet is involved with this. He is a very good surgeon and has operated on my daughter 3 times already. He is truely a gift to earth and will help many kids to come. I owe so much to him and i am glad to see that he is having so much success.