BiVACOR is a titanium device – which is about the size of a fist – will provide an alternative to heart transplants.

The device – to be marketed under the name Bivacor – also will deliver an alternative for people with heart disease over the age of 65, who are currently considered by most doctors to be too old for heart transplants.

The key element of the Bivacor's revolutionary design is a pump that can duplicate the function of both the left and right sides of the heart in a single, small device. Driven by tiny electromagnets, the pump's twin rotors can alter speed and position to suit blood-flow demands that fluctuate depending on a patient's activity. A twin fan inside the pump that can spin at different speeds and also tilt to adjust blood flow and pressure. Once in production, the Bivacor, which has been patented, is expected to cost about $60,000 a unit.

Most existing artificial hearts or supportive pump devices are external, and usually pump through just one side of the heart.  

That places extreme limits on patient mobility and can reveal problems on the other side of a diseased heart.

The Bivacor allows patients to move around and reduces the risk of infection, by being secured inside the body and without external tubes.

A team of biomedical engineers, intensive-care specialists, cardiac surgeons and cardiologists has been working on the project for over seven years at Brisbane's Prince Charles Hospital. 

Key Person: Professor John Fraser, 40, director of the Critical Care Research Group (CCRG) at Prince Charles is the leader of the Bivacor development team.

Funding: Most of the funding for the Bivacor project – about $250,000 so far has come from the Prince Charles Hospital Foundation raising funds. The Bivacor is expected to be in clinical trials in the next three years if the team can secure funding of $3 million.

Similar Field or Competing Companies:
 - Sunshine Heart