Children's Hospital leads projects to develop nation's first heart assist devices for young children

Industry partners in the consortium include Launch Point Technologies (Santa Barbara, Calif.) and WorldHeart Corporation (Salt Lake City).

This project, also funded by the NIH (one of only five centers in the nation to receive NIH funding for such a project), has progressed through an intensive engineering design phase to successful testing in the laboratory. The consortium is entering the final year of the five-year NIH contract to develop the PediaFlow.

“Our dream for the PediaFlow — which is about the size of a walnut — is that it could be totally implanted into a child to support his or her heart until a donor could be located or until the heart function recovers,” Dr. Wearden said. “The PediaFlow would be magnetically powered and potentially could support a child for as long as six months.”

Under the leadership of Victor Morell, MD, chief of Children’s Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Children’s Heart Center has established itself as one of the most active and innovative centers in the care of children in heart failure in the country over the last two decades. Children’s has performed more than 300 heart, heart-lung, lung and heart-liver transplants in children, including more than 200 heart transplants.

Children’s is one of the world’s most experienced centers in the use of VADs to support pediatric transplant patients awaiting donor hearts.

Until such time as a pediatric VAD is developed and approved for use, Children’s is one of several hospitals in the United States to have asked for and been granted, on a case-by-case basis, approval from the FDA to implant the Berlin Heart Excor for compassionate use. Five patients at Children’s have received Berlin Heart Excor devices and gone on to receive successful heart transplants. This VAD, developed in Germany, is an external pump that can be used in small children.

“We’ve been successful in using the Berlin Heart pump to keep young patients alive and healthy long enough for a donor heart to become available for transplant, and we are able to use adult pumps in our larger pediatric patients,” Dr. Morell said. “But getting approval to use a Berlin Heart can be a complicated process, especially when a young child’s survival is dependent on it. This funding from the NIH for these projects is so crucial to our efforts to develop a pediatric VAD for use here in the United States as additional options for the hundreds of kids who suffer heart failure each year.”

For more information on Children’s Heart and Heart-Lung Transplantation Program, please visit www.chp.edu/heartcenter.