$20-Million Artificial Heart Program Given Reprieve

The National Institutes of Health plan to reverse a decision suspending a $20-million program to develop a self-contained artificial heart, Senate and Administration officials said Friday.

The reversal means that research contracts at centers in six states will not be halted at the end of September but will continue for about 5 1/2 years, as originally planned.

The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, part of the national institutes, in May said that it was suspending the program at the end of the fiscal year and shifting its focus instead to developing a left ventricular assist device, which would help a diseased heart pump blood.

The decision provoked an outcry from senators in the states where the research centers are situated. They called the decision “an alarming U-turn” and said the artificial heart program is a key component of the nation’s leadership in biotechnology.

Sens. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) had threatened in a letter to insert an amendment into an appropriations bill to compel the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute to continue the contracts before undertaking new obligations.

Word From Hatch

Word that the contracts are being revived first came from Hatch, who relayed the news to a Utah center with a $5.5-million contract at stake.

“We heard and confirmed that the contract had been reinstated as of the end of the fiscal year, so that there will be no (funding) break,” Roger Bliss of the University of Utah’s Institute for Biomedical Engineering said in a telephone interview on Friday.

“It was originally announced by Sen. Hatch and confirmed through our contacts at NIH,” Bliss said.

Hatch told the Deseret News in Salt Lake City that he had been told by Dr. Claude Lenfant, director of the Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, that artificial heart funding was being restored. Hatch called the decision “good news for the millions who will need artificial hearts or their components.”

There has been no public announcement yet by the institutes that the program is being resumed.

However, an institutes official speaking on condition of anonymity said: “The practicality is that a decision has been made” and an announcement is expected as soon as next week.

No ‘Quick Fix’

The official stressed that the decision was not just a quick fix and that plans are for the program to continue as originally scheduled.

Besides the University of Utah, the other centers conducting the research are the Hershey Medical Center of Pennsylvania State University; Abiomed Inc. of Danvers, Mass., which is working with the Texas Heart Institute of Houston, and the Nimbus Co. of Rancho Cordova, Calif., which is working with the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio.

In announcing that the contracts were being suspended, the national institutes cited budgetary constraints but said the total artificial heart concept was not being abandoned.

The program temporarily suspended is for development of a totally implantable electric heart.