Since Saturday, May 2, 2015, the press continues to question the causes of the death of the second patient fitted with a Carmat artificial heart. Now, and in view of the questions, the French biotechnology company Carmat has chosen to cut short the hypotheses: it is indeed a technical failure of the device that is at the origin of the death of the second transplant patient.
“The first data from the prosthesis show that its functioning has deteriorated due to a defect in controlling the motors leading to a decrease in the volume of blood ejected into the body”, explained the Carmat company in a press release. Following this failure, the medical team attempted to equip the patient with a new prosthesis. Unfortunately, the blood circulation problems caused by the failure of the artificial heart resulted in complications on other organs, leading to the death of the patient.
At the end of 2013, the very first patient equipped with a Carmat heart had died Only 74 days after the operation, his prosthesis having suddenly stopped working. No more precise explanation was given by the company.
Despite this unexplained failure, the Carmat company wished to emphasize the positive data of this second establishment. The first analyzes thus show “the biocompatibility of the prosthesis with the organism and with the blood. The design fundamentals are therefore confirmed at this stage of the analysis. However, Carmat announces that it will continue “the expertise of the causes of the dysfunction that has appeared” in order to prevent this from happening again. As part of this first phase of clinical trials, a third patient was fitted with the device on April 8. A fourth patient should receive this artificial heart before setting up a larger-scale experiment.
If other cardiac prostheses have already been implanted in the past in the world, the arrival of the Carmat heart represents an important hope for people with end-stage heart failure. By its structure consisting of biomaterials partly composed of animal tissue, the carmat heart presents a lower risk of rejection and complications. According to its designers, it could therefore make it possible to make people wait for a transplant patient or even to permanently replace the failing organ. In Europe and the United States, 100,000 patients could be fitted with this device if the trials are ultimately conclusive.
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Carmat heart: the second patient died
Carmat artificial heart: a third patient would have benefited from a transplant
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