Skip to Content
Uncategorized

Smallest Artificial Heart Keeps Baby Alive

Italian doctors implant tiny pump into a 16-month-old boy awaiting his new heart.

Here’s a new twist on an long-running story: an artificial heart kept a baby boy alive for 13 days while doctors waited for his new heart, reports Reuters. The bridge-to-transplant device was an infant version of the Jarvik 2000 and weighed only 11 grams (you can see the device in this slideshow). The titanium implant does not beat but instead uses a rotating motion to pump blood from the heart and through the body.

The baby-sized device was invented by American entrepreneur and doctor Robert Jarvik and had previously been tested only in animals. Jarvik’s artificial hearts first made headlines in 1982 when an early model was implanted into a 61-year-old man. That pioneering patient lived for 112 days. Since then, artificial heart technology has vacillated between hated and hopeful  (see Antonio Regalado’s 1999 feature CPR for the Artificial Heart  and Emily Singer’s 2006 story An Artificial Heart That Doesn’t Beat). The Jarvik 2000 has been used as both a bridge-to-transplant device as well as a “destination therapy” for European patients ineligible for heart transplants. The FDA recently granted conditional approval of a 350-patient study for the Jarvik 2000 as a destination therapy in the U.S, meaning it would be used to extend the lives of people who are dying from congestive heart failure.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

A neural network trained on the experiences of a single young child managed to learn one of the core components of language: how to match words to the objects they represent.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.