A medical achievement gives us heart in these times of doom and gloom

Every year millions of people die from heart failure – one every three hours in Australia – but there are only thousands of heart transplants available worldwide. Even then, donor hearts only last about a decade and the immunosuppressant drugs patients take to stop their body from rejecting them also make them sick, sometimes leading to cancer.

A practical long-term replacement for the human heart is considered one of the holy grails of medicine.

Now, in a major step towards an alternative to heart transplants that could halve deaths from cardiac failure and establish a world-leading medical manufacturing industry in Australia, a NSW man has become the first to leave hospital with a levitating titanium heart. The device is designed to act as a bridge to keep a person alive while they wait for a donor heart transplant to become available, though the long-term goal is for the implant recipients to be able to live with the device without needing a heart transplant.

Dr Daniel Timms began developing the BiVacor total artificial heart implant – a small durable titanium machine with a tiny rotor held in place by magnets – as a Brisbane engineering student in the early 2000s.

He then worked in the United States refining his invention and since July four American patients have received the implant. The NSW man received the implant last November and walked out of St Vincent’s in Darlinghurst last month, the first time anyone left the hospital with the device in place. He received a donor heart just days ago.

The implant is the first in a series of procedures planned under the Artificial Heart Frontiers Program, led by Melbourne’s Monash University with a host of Australian universities and hospitals to develop technology for Timms’ artificial heart implant. The program is funded by a $50 million grant from the federal government’s Medical Research Future Fund, of which $17.5 million was allocated towards the BiVacor trial.

ln time, the BiVacor total artificial heart implant may join penicillin, the cervical cancer vaccine, the bionic ear, spray-on artificial skin, the cause of sudden infant death syndrome and the artificial heart valve in the roll call of great Australian medical breakthroughs.

But as we celebrate the latest achievements we should not forget that those, and many other great Australian moments in medical and scientific research, were funded by government grants and private donations.

In recent times, medical and scientific research has become more dependent on the income of universities but the future of funds for research is growing increasingly uncertain as the Albanese government pursues a cap on international student numbers to defuse criticism about the level of arrivals and net migration.

We believe it a short-term fix, unworthy of our wonderful underappreciated scientists and researchers. Meanwhile, sursum corda is one of those Latin phrases laced through liturgy, poetry, classical music, place names and school mottos. It means “lift up your hearts”. In these times of doom and gloom, such a major Australian medical breakthrough does just that.

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