human organ technology with the first implant of an artificial heart designed

• Image Credit: AFP
• A file picture shows leading heart transplant specialist Alain Carpentier presenting a cardiac valve used to design a fully implantable artificial heart designed to overcome the worldwide shortage of transplant donors which will be produce by Biomedical firm Carmat, a start-up funded by the European space and defence group EADS. Professor Alain Carpentier is the co-founder of Carmat, the French biomedical firm who conceived a prototype artificial heart.

France has claimed a breakthrough in human organ technology with the first implant of an artificial heart designed to replace the need for a transplant from another person.

President Francois Hollande, anxious to lift a mood of pessimism over the country’s economy, hailed the event as an example of French innovation.

“France can be proud of this exceptional deed in the service of human progress,” Hollande wrote in a letter to Alain Carpentier, the veteran inventor of the artificial heart, and the medical team that carried out the operation.

The device, which autonomously mimics the action of a real heart, was implanted in an anonymous 75-year-old man with terminal heart disease on December 18 at the Georges Pompidou European hospital in Paris. He was said by the hospital at the weekend to be awake and talking, making jokes with his family and doctors.

The operation represents a critical moment for Carmat, the quoted company founded by Prof Carpentier and his industrial backers in the 1990s to develop the artificial organ. The implant was confirmed in a statement by Carmat after the market closed on Friday.

Prof Carpentier, 80, was a pioneer of replacement heart valves using animal tissue and combined with aeronautic engineers from what was to become EADS, the aerospace company, to develop the prosthetic heart. EADS continues to hold a 33 per cent stake in Carmat, which was listed on the Paris bourse in 2010.