This Jarvik-7 artificial heart was used in the first bridge operation in 1985 meant to replace a failing heart while the patient waited for a donor organ.
In June, a team of surgeons at Duke University Hospital implanted the latest model of an artificial heart in a 39-year-old man with severe heart failure, a condition in which the heart doesn't pump properly. The man's mechanical heart, made by French company Carmat, is a new generation artificial heart and the first of its kind to be transplanted in the United States. It connects to a portable external power supply and is designed to keep the patient alive until a replacement organ becomes available.
Many patients die while waiting for a heart transplant, but artificial hearts can bridge the gap. Though not a permanent solution for heart failure, artificial hearts have saved countless lives since their first implantation in 1982.
What might surprise you is that the origin of the artificial heart dates back decades before, when an inventive television actor teamed up with a famous doctor to design and patent the first such device.
A man of many talents
Paul Winchell was an entertainer in the 1950s and 60s, rising to fame as a ventriloquist and guest-starring as an actor on programs like "The Ed Sullivan Show" and "Perry Mason." When children's animation boomed in the 1960s, Winchell made a name for himself as a voice actor on shows like "The Smurfs," "Winnie the Pooh," and "The Jetsons." He eventually became famous for originating the voices of Tigger from "Winnie the Pooh" and Gargamel from "The Smurfs," among many others.
But Winchell wasn't just an entertainer: He also had a quiet passion for science and medicine. Between television gigs, Winchell busied himself working as a medical hypnotist and acupuncturist, treating the same Hollywood stars he performed alongside. When he wasn't doing that, Winchell threw himself into engineering and design, building not only the ventriloquism dummies he used on his television appearances but a host of products he'd dreamed up himself. Winchell spent hours tinkering with his own inventions, such as a set of battery-powered gloves and something called a "flameless lighter." Over the course of his life, Winchell designed and patented more than 30 of these products – mostly novelties, but also serious medical devices, such as a portable blood plasma defroster.
| Ventriloquist Paul Winchell with Jerry Mahoney, his dummy, in 1951 |
A meeting of the minds
In the early 1950s, Winchell appeared on a variety show called the "Arthur Murray Dance Party" and faced off in a dance competition with the legendary Ricardo Montalban (Winchell won). At a cast party for the show later that same night, Winchell met Dr. Henry Heimlich – the same doctor who would later become famous for inventing the Heimlich maneuver, who was married to Murray's daughter. The two hit it off immediately, bonding over their shared interest in medicine. Before long, Heimlich invited Winchell to come observe him in the operating room at the hospital where he worked. Winchell jumped at the opportunity, and not long after he became a frequent guest in Heimlich's surgical theatre, fascinated by the mechanics of the human body.
One day while Winchell was observing at the hospital, he witnessed a patient die on the operating table after undergoing open-heart surgery. He was suddenly struck with an idea: If there was some way doctors could keep blood pumping temporarily throughout the body during surgery, patients who underwent risky operations like open-heart surgery might have a better chance of survival. Winchell rushed to Heimlich with the idea – and Heimlich agreed to advise Winchell and look over any design drafts he came up with. So Winchell went to work.
Winchell's heart
As it turned out, building ventriloquism dummies wasn't that different from building an artificial heart, Winchell noted later in his autobiography – the shifting valves and chambers of the mechanical heart were similar to the moving eyes and opening mouths of his puppets. After each design, Winchell would go back to Heimlich and the two would confer, making adjustments along the way to.
By 1956, Winchell had perfected his design: The "heart" consisted of a bag that could be placed inside the human body, connected to a battery-powered motor outside of the body. The motor enabled the bag to pump blood throughout the body, similar to a real human heart. Winchell received a patent for the design in 1963.
At the time, Winchell never quite got the credit he deserved. Years later, researchers at the University of Utah, working on their own artificial heart, came across Winchell's patent and got in touch with Winchell to compare notes. Winchell ended up donating his patent to the team, which included Dr. Richard Jarvik. Jarvik expanded on Winchell's design and created the Jarvik-7 – the world's first artificial heart to be successfully implanted in a human being in 1982.
The Jarvik-7 has since been replaced with newer, more efficient models made up of different synthetic materials, allowing patients to live for longer stretches without the heart clogging or breaking down. With each new generation of hearts, heart failure patients have been able to live relatively normal lives for longer periods of time and with fewer complications than before – and it never would have been possible without the unsung genius of a puppeteer and his love of science.
Miniature lab-grown models of human organs have major advantages over standard animal testing.
But he wasn't the only one to follow this train of thought. In the year since the pandemic began, many researchers have been using organoids to study how the coronavirus infects human cells, and find potential treatments. Beumer's pivot represents a remarkable and fast-emerging paradigm shift in how drugs and diseases will be studied in the coming decades. With future pandemics likely to be more frequent and deadlier, such a shift is necessary to reduce the average clinical development time of 5.9 years for antiviral agents.
Part of that shift means developing models that replicate human biology in the lab. Animal models, which are the current standard in biomedical research, fail to do so—96% of drugs that pass animal testing, for example, fail to make it to market. Injecting potentially toxic drugs into living creatures, before eventually slaughtering them, also raises ethical concerns for some. Organoids, on the other hand, respond to infectious diseases, or potential treatments, in a way that is relevant to humans, in addition to being slaughter-free.
Human intestinal organoids infected with SARS-CoV-2 (white).
Credit: Joep Beumer/Clevers group/Hubrecht Institute
Urgency Sparked Momentum
Though brain organoids were previously used to study the Zika virus during the 2015-16 epidemic, it wasn't until COVID-19 that the field really started to change. "The organoid field has advanced a lot in the last year. The speed at which it happened is crazy," says Shuibing Chen, an associate professor at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. She adds that many federal and private funding agencies have now seen the benefits of organoids, and are starting to appreciate their potential in the biomedical field.
Last summer, the Organo-Strat (OS) network—a German network that uses human organoid models to study COVID-19's effects—received 3.2 million euros in funding from the German government. "When the pandemic started, we became aware that we didn't have the right models to immediately investigate the effects of the virus," says Andreas Hocke, professor of infectious diseases at the Charité Universitätsmedizin in Berlin, Germany, and coordinator of the OS network. Hocke explained that while the World Health Organization's animal models showed an "overlap of symptoms'' with humans, there was "no clear reflection" of the same disease.
"The network functions as a way of connecting organoid experts with infectious disease experts across Germany," Hocke continues. "Having organoid models on demand means we can understand how a virus infects human cells from the first moment it's isolated." Overall, OS aims to create infrastructure that could be applied to future pandemics. There are 28 sub-projects involved in the network, covering a wide assortment of individual organoids.
Cost, however, remains an obstacle to scaling up, says Chen. She says there is also a limit to what we can learn from organoids, given that they only represent a single organ. "We can add drugs to organoids to see how the cells respond, but these tests don't tell us anything about drug metabolism, for example," she explains.
A Related "Leaps" in Progress
One way to solve this issue is to use an organ-on-a-chip system. These are miniature chips containing a variety of human cells, as well as small channels along which functions like blood or air flow can be recreated. This allows scientists to perform more complex experiments, like studying drug metabolism, while producing results that are relevant to humans.
An organ-on-a-chip system.
Credit: Fraunhofer IGB
Such systems are also able to elicit an immune response. The FDA has even entered into an agreement with Wyss Institute spinoff Emulate to use their lung-on-a-chip system to test COVID-19 vaccines. Representing multiple organs in one system is also possible. Berlin-based TissUse are aiming to make a so-called 'human on a chip' system commercially available. But TissUse senior scientist Ilka Maschmeyer warns that there is a limit to how far the technology can go. "The system will not think or feel, so it wouldn't be possible to test for illnesses affecting these abilities," she says.
Some challenges also remain in the usability of organs-on-a-chip. "Specialized training is required to use them as they are so complex," says Peter Loskill, assistant professor and head of the organ-on-a-chip group at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Hocke agrees with this. "Cell culture scientists would easily understand how to use organoids in a lab, but when using a chip, you need additional biotechnology knowledge," he says.
One major advantage of both technologies is the possibility of personalized medicine: Cells can be taken from a patient and put onto a chip, for example, to test their individual response to a treatment. Loskill also says there are other uses outside of the biomedical field, such as cosmetic and chemical testing.
"Although these technologies offer a lot of possibilities, they need time to develop," Loskill continues. He stresses, however, that it's not just the technology that needs to change. "There's a lot of conservative thinking in biomedical research that says this is how we've always done things. To really study human biology means approaching research questions in a completely new way."
Even so, he thinks that the pandemic marked a shift in people's thinking—no one cared how the results were found, as long as it was done quickly. But Loskill adds that it's important to balance promise, potential, and expectations when it comes to these new models. "Maybe in 15 years' time we will have a limited number of animal models in comparison to now, but the timescale depends on many factors," he says.
Beumer, now a post-doc, was eventually allowed to return to the lab to develop his coronavirus model, and found working on it to be an eye-opening experience. He saw first-hand how his research could have an impact on something that was affecting the entire human race, as well as the pressure that comes with studying potential treatments. Though he doesn't see a future for himself in infectious diseases, he hopes to stick with organoids. "I've now gotten really excited about the prospect of using organoids for drug discovery," he says.
The coronavirus pandemic has slowed society down in many respects, but it has flung biomedical research into the future—from mRNA vaccines to healthcare models based on human biology. It may be difficult to fully eradicate animal models, but over the coming years, organoids and organs-on-a-chip may become the standard for the sake of efficacy -- and ethics.