Four cardiac surgery centers in Europe and the Middle East will be the first to test an artificial heart using both cow heart tissue and synthetic mechanical parts.
 
The “bioprosthetic” heart, which can automatically adjust to and detect a patient’s exertion level, was developed by Paris-based Carmat and aims to help heart transplant patients who have been waitlisted.
 
Carmat got approval to partner with four institutions -- the St Pierre University Hospital in Belgium, the Silesian Center for Heart Disease in Poland, the Prince Sultan Cardiac Center in Saudi Arabia and the University Medical Centre Ljubljana in Slovenia – May 14, according to the company’s news release.
 
“The idea was to develop an artificial heart in which the moving parts that are in contact with blood are made of tissue that is [better suited] for the biological environment,” Carmat’s Chief Medical Officer Piet Jansen told Mashable.  
 
So how does Carmat’s device differ from other artificial hearts? Aside from the use of cow tissue, “a motorized pump moves hydraulic fluid in and out of the chambers,” which is separated by a biological membrane of bovine heart tissue to make the device more “biocompatible,” allowing blood to flow from one chamber to the other, Mashable reports. The bionic device also uses heart valves from cow heart tissue with blood pressure sensors attached.
Using cow tissue, Carmat believes, could lessen patients’ clotting risk after the transplant.
 
But while a promising alternative for heart transplant patients, the device is still new and “the patient selection process and the training of the clinical teams are ongoing in [the aforementioned] four countries” and supervised by Carmat staff, the company notes in the release.