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WASHINGTON, June 25 (UPI) -- A 93-year-old surgeon who pioneered development of an innovative heart pump based in part on space shuttle technology nailed a top NASA award on Tuesday.
Dr. Michael DeBakey, an internationally known heart surgeon, inventor and presidential medical adviser, got the idea for the tiny pump after treating and speaking with a Johnson Space Center shuttle engineer who needed a heart transplant.
Borrowing ideas from the pressurized, high-speed pumps that deliver propellants to the space shuttle main engines, DeBakey, his colleague George Noon and a team of NASA engineers came up with a miniature pump that is quieter, cheaper and much smaller than heart pumps currently available.
NASA, which owns the patent for the device, granted an exclusive license to commercialize the pump to MicroMed Technology of Houston, which has spent $50 million in development so far, company president Dallas Anderson said in an interview with United Press International.
Clinical trials of the device began in Europe in 1998, said Anderson, explaining that MicroMed went overseas first because the regulatory approval process is quicker. Clinical trials in the United States began this year. So far, 162 MicroMed DeBakey VADs, or ventricular assist devices, have been implanted in heart patients.
Anderson expects the pump to become commercially available in two years.
The device can serve as a bridge to keep a healthy supply of blood flowing throughout the body while a patient is awaiting a new heart or can be permanently implanted in people who an ineligible for transplants. It also could be used in emergency room situations to help victims of heart attacks.
"This incredible invention will improve the lives of thousands of heart patients here on Earth," said NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe in presenting the agency's Commercial Invention of the Year award to DeBakey, the chancellor emeritus of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and Noon, a senior physician at The Methodist Hospital in Houston.
"Through your deeds, you have demonstrated that discovery and invention is indeed alive and well in America," O'Keefe told DeBakey.
(Reported by Irene Brown, UPI Science News, in Cape Canaveral, Fla.)
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