Heinrich Schima, artificial heart expert at MedUni Vienna, was awarded the Emil Bücherl Prize for his life’s work at the annual conference of the European Society for Artificial Organs (ESAO) in the Kaiser-Krönungshalle in Aachen. The laudatory speech paid particular tribute to the combination of important research, the development of new fields of research in pump control and usability and the commitment to patients with ventricular assist devices.
This also honored the decades-long activities of the Vienna group for "artificial heart" therapy, which made many pioneering activities possible through the interdisciplinary collaboration of physicians, technicians and researchers at MedUni Vienna and the associated Boltzmann Institute for Cardiovascular Research.
As early as the 1970s, the Vienna working group under Jan Navratil and later Ernst Wolner developed pneumatic artificial hearts, which were successfully used from 1986 onwards following the establishment of heart transplantation as a bridge from critically ill patients to transplantation. The working group then delved deeper into the development of rotary blood pumps and was able to make significant contributions to questions of blood damage and the monitoring of such systems. The World Society for Mechanical Circulatory Support (ISMCS) developed from the symposia organized in Austria. In 1998, the first fully implantable rotary pumps (a NASA development) were implanted in Vienna, and an algorithm for the physiologically adapted control of such pumps was subsequently developed here for the first time and validated in a clinical study. In 2006, a pump with a hydrodynamically floating rotor was implanted in Vienna for the first time in the world, and the Vienna group made a significant contribution to its further development. Another focus of research is the operating safety of these life-sustaining systems, where questions of usability (=operating safety) are addressed together with patients, relatives and clinical staff.
Heinrich Schima has also been a member of MedUni Vienna’s Ethics Committee for 12 years and has been involved in the implementation of the MDR in Austrian practice in the interests of the highest patient welfare while minimizing bureaucracy at the same time. The interdisciplinary collaboration now benefits several dozen patients every year in Vienna alone, who receive such systems for long-term bridging or even permanent treatment at the Department of Cardiac Surgery.
The ESAO
The ESAO (European Society for Artificial Organs) is the European Society for Artificial Organs, in which interdisciplinary work in medicine, natural sciences and technology on circulatory support, ECMO, dialysis, apheresis and liver support is discussed in congresses and workshops. It celebrated its 50th anniversary at this congress. www.esao.org.
