Never two without three. More than eight months after the second implantation of a Carmat artificial heart, a third patient would have undergone an intervention by the hands of Professor Christian Latrémouille. The operation would have taken place at the Georges Pompidou European Hospital, in Paris, in total discretion.
Apart from Liberation which reveals the information, no message has filtered either on the progress of the operation or on its outcome. Just do we know, always from the daily newspaper, that the transplant went well.
And what about the patient’s condition? “The postoperative follow-up is delicate,” the newspaper specifies, without this being confirmed by the hospital or by the Carmat company. This listed on the stock exchange, would bow to this silence for fear of affecting the price of its share by disseminating information.
This third operation would have taken time to be put in place because of the difficulty in finding patients “because we are still at the research stage with strong constraints”, explains to Liberation a surgeon involved in the protocol. A binding protocol which requires the patient to be of strong build to be able to withstand the load of the artificial prosthesis (900g), which weighs three times that of a natural organ.
Another requirement: the participating patient must suffer from a heart disease that threatens his life in the short term, unlike a conventional heart transplant.
A fourth expected operation
This heart transplant is the third in a serieswhich began on December 18, 2013 in Paris on a 76-year-old patient. He did not survive the transplant, after the machine was accidentally stopped and because of his very deteriorated state of health before the operation.
The second patientwas transplanted on August 5, 2014 at Nantes University Hospital. The 68-year-old man who suffered from end-stage heart failure is still alive and doing well. Autonomous, the patient claims to have resumed an almost normal life and can even ride a bicycle.
With this third transplant, the Carmat company is continuing the first of the two clinical trial phases. Ultimately, the company hopes to obtain approval and marketing of the device in the European Union. A fourth operation should be carried out to test the safety and assess the survival of the patients, according to the Parisian.
>> To read also: The Carmat company is still considering twenty transplants
Carmat heart: the second patient tells