Jassawalla’s artificial heart

Congestive heart failure, a degenerative progressive disease, kills 500,000 Americans every year, informs The Gateway (August 14, 2001), the bulletin of the Rotary Club of Bombay. There are only two treatment options available — a heart transplant or the use of an artificial heart. With only 4,500 donor hearts available worldwide, the demand for artificial hearts is reckoned at 100,000 a year all over the world.

The Gateway ascribes these figures to a talk given by Jal S. Jassawalla who is said to have spent his entire working life developing an implantable artificial heart which received the approval of the US Federal Drug Agency (FDA) two years ago. Since then 1,300 patients have received a new lease of life, notes The Gateway.

The World Heart Corporation’s senior vice-president, Jassawalla, with 15 patents for implantable devices under his belt, is said to be working to develop the next generation of heart assistance systems.

The topic of Jassawalla’s Rotary lecture was "Challenges in the making of an implantable artificial heart.” This integrated pump drive unit is placed in the upper left quadrant of the abdomen. It has an inflow connection to the left ventricle of the heart and an outlet connected to the aorta, the main artery of the body. The device is designed to be self-regulating, he said.

Describing the advantages of the artificial heart as compared to a transplant, Jassawalla said, "First, you leave the normal regulatory mechanisms intact if you leave the heart in place. Second, the heart can act as a back-up should you have a problem with the device. And third, in a few patients we have removed the device after a prolonged period of support. We call this a ‘bridge to recovery application’ which we would not have been able to do had we removed the patient’s heart.”

Powered by a pair of batteries, the device is made of material that is bio-compatible, inert and not capable of triggering the body’s rejection mechanism, notes the The Gateway article.

The durable miniature device transfers power without damaging the body’s tissues and is blood compatible. It has been designed to keep pace with the human heart which beats 15 million times a year, notes the write-up. It is monitored with a remote so that non-invasive intervention, if ever required, is possible.

The artificial heart was subjected to long-term bench testing, animal experiments and clinical trials spanning 18 months, which involved comparison of survival with "controls” (patients treated with the best available medical therapy). The device recipients recorded a survival rate of 87 percent against the controls’ survival rate of 35 percent, winning it the FDA approval. Moreover, the patients who survived enjoyed a better quality of life, leading normal lives, Jassawalla told his audience.

Developed at a cost of $ 250 million, the device has been implanted in patients throughout the world whose average age is reckoned at 48 years. Jassa­walla informed the gathering that the next generation systems will be smaller, simpler and "more forgettable” for the recipient. His team is also working to extend the product life of the device from the current five to 10 years and to reduce the cost from the present $70,000 (which does not include hospital stay and other expenses) as well as the overall cost of the therapy, said Jassawalla.

The son of Roshan and Sohrab Jassawalla, Jal is a former student of Bombay’s Cathedral and John Connon High School who completed his masters in mechanical engineering from Stanford University in 1970 and his MBA from Berkeley in 1978. Married to Diane, Jassawalla enjoys a good read. The couple have two children, a daughter Amisa, 16, who has just graduated from high school and a son Nikhil, 14, informs their grandmother Roshan.