An Australian man in his forties made medical history by becoming the first person in the world to live for over 100 days with a completely artificial titanium heart while awaiting a transplant. On March 6, he underwent a successful donor heart transplant after relying on the BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart for 105 days.
The patient, who wishes to remain anonymous, had severe end-stage heart failure and had little chance of survival without a transplant. In November 2024, he underwent a six-hour surgery to implant the BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart at St Vincent's Hospital Sydney. This device, invented by Australian biomedical engineer Daniel Timms, uses magnetic levitation technology with a single rotating disc to pump blood, differing fundamentally from previous artificial hearts that typically support only the left side.
The titanium artificial heart is less complicated than previous models, featuring only a single moving part: a magnetically levitated rotor that continuously pumps blood without friction. After spending several weeks in intensive care followed by monitoring in the hospital, the patient was discharged in early February 2025, becoming the first person in the world to be discharged from the hospital with the titanium heart.
On March 6, 2025, after more than three months with the titanium heart device, the patient underwent a successful transplant surgery thanks to a matching human donor. According to a statement from the hospital, he is recovering well. “In this case, the patient had a very weak left side and right side of the heart, and so we didn't have any other option really,” said Chris Hayward, a transplant cardiologist at St Vincent's Hospital Sydney who helped treat the man, according to Smithsonian Magazine. He also noted, “He was in what we call heart failure, where his fluid builds up and he can't walk any distance before becoming very short of breath.”
“It is incredible to see that decades of research are now saving real lives,” said Daniel Timms, founder of the company BiVACOR, as reported by T-Online. The BiVACOR heart has no valves or mechanical bearings, making it particularly durable and resistant to wear. Unlike other artificial hearts that have multiple moving parts that can wear out, the BiVACOR heart has only one rotating disc, reducing the risk of failure.
The heart consists of a motor and a single magnetic levitation rotor, which is supported by magnets and has no contact with any surface. This disc floats in place using magnets, so it does not touch anything, which means there is no friction and reduces the likelihood of damage over time. The technology used in the BiVACOR artificial heart is similar to that employed in maglev trains, such as Japan's Linear Chuo Shinkansen line under construction to link Tokyo and Nagoya.
The BiVACOR device has an external controller with a rechargeable and wireless battery, allowing patient mobility. However, patients must remain connected to an external power source at all times. With fewer moving parts than other artificial hearts that typically involve flexing chambers or pumping diaphragms, BiVACOR's titanium heart is expected to last 10 years or more, much longer than present-day devices.
Some cardiologists hypothesize that the BiVACOR device could become a permanent option for those who are not candidates for transplant due to age or physical conditions, but this needs to be tested with specific studies. The need for alternatives like artificial hearts is due to the difficulty in finding a donor heart; millions are waiting for a donor heart, but only a fraction actually receive one, and matching can take a long time.
In America, nearly 6.7 million adults suffer from heart failure, a serious condition in which the heart can no longer pump enough blood and oxygen to support the body's other organs, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Heart failure affects at least 26 million people worldwide. However, heart transplants remain rare, with fewer than 6,000 performed annually worldwide, and are reserved only for the most severe cases.
The BiVACOR device, made of titanium, is meant to be a stopgap for patients awaiting donor hearts and has now saved a patient's life for more than 100 days for the first time. It can help address the donor shortage problem by keeping patients alive while they wait for a real heart transplant. Between July and November 2022, four other men aged between their mid-forties and mid-sixties in the United States also received the BiVACOR TAH device. All five men in the U.S. trial lived with the BiVACOR device in a hospital for up to a month until donor hearts became available, and each patient successfully transitioned to a donor heart transplant and was discharged from the hospital within a month.
“If all goes well with the clinical trials, I could imagine the device being available more globally in four to five years,” said Joseph Rogers, president and CEO of the Texas Heart Institute, who is leading the U.S. trials, according to Al Jazeera. This achievement raises hopes that fully mechanical hearts may one day eliminate the need for donor transplants, although experts estimate that there is still a long way to go before this technology can completely replace heart transplantation.
Daniel Timms hopes to make improvements to BiVACOR that would eliminate the need for an external battery altogether, according to Elise Worthington and Paige Cockburn of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The vision is something like wireless phone charging, with a charger placed over the patient's chest in a way that won't burn their skin.
The article was written with the assistance of a news analysis system.