A new artificial heart that could save, in Italy alone, up to 300 more patients per year, with a huge impact on transplants internationally.
It is the project that the Trentino cardiac surgeon Gino Gerosa, director of the complex cardiac surgery unit of the Padua hospital-university company and the Gallucci Center of Padua, has been working on for ten years.
Born in Rovereto, Gerosa is world famous for his fully successful "extreme" heart transplants, with which he has sometimes challenged regulatory limits and prohibitions in order to save human lives.
"Every year in Italy there are an average of 700 heart disease patients registered on waiting lists for a transplant. Of them, less than 30 percent receive a new heart due to the insufficient number of organs coming from donors", recalled the specialist during the presentation of the project in Trento.
"The new research project, which is about to start thanks to an important source of funding (thanks to the various public and private financiers who chose to remain anonymous, the objective of 50 million euros of necessary resources was reached), concerns the creation of a prototype of an artificial heart that is smaller and less noisy than those that already exist and which, at the moment, are used as a sort of 'bridge organ', before the implantation of a new natural heart", he explains Gerosa.
The event - a multi-voiced talk on the frontiers of cardiac surgery - curated by Muse and Mart in collaboration with Aido, attracted more than 100 people, including the provincial health councilor Mario Tonina.
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