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Carmat a French company has a total heart product for a while in Europe. In February they celebrated the 100 implants, with the longest one lasting 25 month. ht

Carmat a French company has a total heart product for a while in Europe. In February they celebrated the 100 implants, with the longest one lasting 25 month. https://www.carmatsa.com/en/our_product/ https://www.carmatsa.com/en/our_product/ However this is really difficult and the company is struggling financially as the market is rather limited.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
Really sucks a company doing something important like this is struggling. Such kind of company shouldn't need to worry about profits because we know how profit-minded medical breakthroughs look like.
- Traubenfuchs 2y ago
  Easy to say, but who SHOULD pay for this, lenmeldy or zolgensma? (Compared to those treatments an artificial heart is cheap.) Those easily cost more than the average human earns in their life. Should the public be financially burdened by outrageously expensive research and treatments for rare diseases? When do we say, it‘s enough, your condition is not compatible with life, enjoy some palliative treatment?
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > Those easily cost more than the average human earns in their life. For this, we have insurance - to distribute the chance of utterly bad luck across all in society.
  - david-gpu 2y ago
    > Should the public be financially burdened by outrageously expensive research and treatments for rare diseases? Yes, precisely because they are rare and thus market forces will fail to provide a treatment. > When do we say, it‘s enough, your condition is not compatible with life, enjoy some palliative treatment? That will vary case by case, depending on how much the public votes in favor of socialized care vs the suffering of these people.
    - WithinReason 2y ago
      I think the point raised by GP is about distribution of finite resources for maximum benefit. E.g. do we spend a large amount of money to extend someone's life by 2 years if we could spend the same money to save 10 lives elsewhere?
      - maratc 2y ago
        > if we could spend the same money to save 10 lives elsewhere? ... if we could spend the same money to extend 10 lives by n years elsewhere.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        1. I think we underestimate our scarcity nowadays, since much of it is completely manufactured by rich powers who want to keep an obedient working class. We are definitely approaching a point of achieving post scarcity society. No one should have to starve nor fear for their health in 90% of cases. 2. In such a case, we'd add help chip in for it. There aren't thousands of new people every day needing artificial hearts. There is certainly enough commerce in any first world country to fund such cases.
        bulletsvshumans 2y ago
        Pending AGI, I don’t think medical intervention at the cutting edge of innovation will ever be post scarcity. It makes more sense in relation to things that are well established enough that they are well understood and producible at scale.
      - rustrustrust 2y ago
        [flagged]
  - spookie 2y ago
    It's research like this that throughout the ages has led our life expectancy to grow as much as it has. We are just tackling more and more niche areas because we have solved a lot of the easy stuff. It's like computers, but more life threatening :)
  - jajko 2y ago
    Yes, its called a developed society and compassion for a fellow less fortunate man. Christianity for example has this at its absolute core, as do all other religions. But since I saw first hand how US population in general sees and treats homeless and those with mental issues, I dont think the message gets through. Whole (not only) western world can make such system work for a fraction of US healthcare costs, why shouldnt US? Maybe in 5 years after some health issue or accident you will end up on sone lifelong treatment, then you may reconsider how others will help you survive.
    - viraptor 2y ago
      > Christianity for example has this at its absolute core, Some Christian groups have it at the core. There's lots of those that will be happy to see others suffer.
      - idiotsecant 2y ago
        Christianity with a capital C has rules. If you don't obey them you are not Christian.
        viraptor 2y ago
        In theory, sure. But once those not obeying the rules become a large part of the system without a serious pushback, it means the rules don't really matter. For example there's a national Catholic radio station which has been told off by the pope and... still runs and has local church support. Signed, "little devil" as called by my "Christian" family listening to it. At some point it's just playing no-true-Scotsman, while the original meaning of the word died.
  - wiseowise 2y ago
    > When do we say, it‘s enough, your condition is not compatible with life, enjoy some palliative treatment? When it doesn’t affect you, obviously. Maybe if some billionaire had 5 less jets, we could push medicine a little bit further and save more lives for the benefit of humanity.
    - southernplaces7 2y ago
      >Maybe if some billionaire had 5 less jets, we could push medicine a little bit further and save more lives for the benefit of humanity. Where in the world did this strange leap of logic come from? For one thing, whether most billionaires have one or more jets has nothing at all to do with medical funding (which is in any case colossal, far larger than any airplane budget of any number of billionaires). Secondly, it's precisely the billioniares and in some cases multimillionaires who finance a lot of the more extreme tech explorations to life extension. Being fantastically rich is exceptionally conducive to wanting to live as long as possible. Any technology their funding leads to isn't going to stay bottled up for long. More fundamentally, there seems to be a sort of odd reasoning with these arguments that if X amount of current funding for healthcare, no matter how incredibly huge, doesn't achieve Y results to fix an endless number of hard medical problems, it must be because someone is siphoning off needed funding. Considering how much funding healthcare gets already, at least allow that the problem might just be one of extremely difficult problems that won't be solved too easily regardless of how much money is thrown at them..
  - geraneum 2y ago
    sometimes I read these sentiments in 2025, and read about “Shanidar 1” who lived ~50k years ago and just feel… sad.
    - ljf 2y ago
      Id never heard of them - for others they were a Neanderthal whose remains show signs of healing and treatment for various ailments, that could have killed them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanidar_Cave https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanidar_Cave
  - idiotsecant 2y ago
    I suspect this is an intentionally edgy take but I'll bite. Basic research has proven thousands of times to be a force multiplier in everything, healthcare included. The reason we do this (if you're strictly looking at it from a sociopaths point of view) is that it benefits the next generation of design when we learn why these ones break. The reason you should want to do it if you have a functioning human soul is to lessen the suffering of others if you have the ability to do so.
- stavros 2y ago
  Health economics is a fairly large field, and there are tradeoffs everywhere. Generally, you try to maximise quality-adjusted life years gained, which for rare diseases doesn't tend to win. If you can give one person ten good years for a million in a rare disease, you can give ten people twenty good years in a less rare disease, so those tend to get more funding.
  - wenwolf 2y ago
    True, but rare disease treatments have little to do with artificial hearts, they are a treatment for a very common disease but at an impractical state for most candidates.
rossant 2y ago
> An Australian man with heart failure has become the first person in the world to walk out of a hospital with a total artificial heart implant. So... Why don't they mention Carmat?
- aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
  This was very unclear in the article - typically artificial hearts have external pumps and motors, the internal component is basically a fancy valve to manage flow/oxygenation correctly. But this one has an internal pump and motor, like a real heart, but with an external battery pack. (The battery currently only lasts four hours...I am too absent-minded to be trusted with this!) This article was a bit more clear: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-12/sydney-hospital-artificial-heart-implant-operation-success/105036154 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-12/sydney-hospital-artif...
  - viraptor 2y ago
    Only four hours? That sounds problematic for sleep...
    - mog_dev 2y ago
      You can probably use an external power supply when you are not moving
- supermatt 2y ago
  I guess it’s to do with what is considered “artificial”? Carmat uses bovine pericardium to line blood contacting surfaces.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

Really sucks a company doing something important like this is struggling. Such kind of company shouldn't need to worry about profits because we know how profit-minded medical breakthroughs look like.

Traubenfuchs 2y ago
Easy to say, but who SHOULD pay for this, lenmeldy or zolgensma? (Compared to those treatments an artificial heart is cheap.) Those easily cost more than the average human earns in their life. Should the public be financially burdened by outrageously expensive research and treatments for rare diseases? When do we say, it‘s enough, your condition is not compatible with life, enjoy some palliative treatment?
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > Those easily cost more than the average human earns in their life. For this, we have insurance - to distribute the chance of utterly bad luck across all in society.
- david-gpu 2y ago
  > Should the public be financially burdened by outrageously expensive research and treatments for rare diseases? Yes, precisely because they are rare and thus market forces will fail to provide a treatment. > When do we say, it‘s enough, your condition is not compatible with life, enjoy some palliative treatment? That will vary case by case, depending on how much the public votes in favor of socialized care vs the suffering of these people.
  - WithinReason 2y ago
    I think the point raised by GP is about distribution of finite resources for maximum benefit. E.g. do we spend a large amount of money to extend someone's life by 2 years if we could spend the same money to save 10 lives elsewhere?
    - maratc 2y ago
      > if we could spend the same money to save 10 lives elsewhere? ... if we could spend the same money to extend 10 lives by n years elsewhere.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      1. I think we underestimate our scarcity nowadays, since much of it is completely manufactured by rich powers who want to keep an obedient working class. We are definitely approaching a point of achieving post scarcity society. No one should have to starve nor fear for their health in 90% of cases. 2. In such a case, we'd add help chip in for it. There aren't thousands of new people every day needing artificial hearts. There is certainly enough commerce in any first world country to fund such cases.
      - bulletsvshumans 2y ago
        Pending AGI, I don’t think medical intervention at the cutting edge of innovation will ever be post scarcity. It makes more sense in relation to things that are well established enough that they are well understood and producible at scale.
    - rustrustrust 2y ago
      [flagged]
- spookie 2y ago
  It's research like this that throughout the ages has led our life expectancy to grow as much as it has. We are just tackling more and more niche areas because we have solved a lot of the easy stuff. It's like computers, but more life threatening :)
- jajko 2y ago
  Yes, its called a developed society and compassion for a fellow less fortunate man. Christianity for example has this at its absolute core, as do all other religions. But since I saw first hand how US population in general sees and treats homeless and those with mental issues, I dont think the message gets through. Whole (not only) western world can make such system work for a fraction of US healthcare costs, why shouldnt US? Maybe in 5 years after some health issue or accident you will end up on sone lifelong treatment, then you may reconsider how others will help you survive.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    > Christianity for example has this at its absolute core, Some Christian groups have it at the core. There's lots of those that will be happy to see others suffer.
    - idiotsecant 2y ago
      Christianity with a capital C has rules. If you don't obey them you are not Christian.
      - viraptor 2y ago
        In theory, sure. But once those not obeying the rules become a large part of the system without a serious pushback, it means the rules don't really matter. For example there's a national Catholic radio station which has been told off by the pope and... still runs and has local church support. Signed, "little devil" as called by my "Christian" family listening to it. At some point it's just playing no-true-Scotsman, while the original meaning of the word died.
- wiseowise 2y ago
  > When do we say, it‘s enough, your condition is not compatible with life, enjoy some palliative treatment? When it doesn’t affect you, obviously. Maybe if some billionaire had 5 less jets, we could push medicine a little bit further and save more lives for the benefit of humanity.
  - southernplaces7 2y ago
    >Maybe if some billionaire had 5 less jets, we could push medicine a little bit further and save more lives for the benefit of humanity. Where in the world did this strange leap of logic come from? For one thing, whether most billionaires have one or more jets has nothing at all to do with medical funding (which is in any case colossal, far larger than any airplane budget of any number of billionaires). Secondly, it's precisely the billioniares and in some cases multimillionaires who finance a lot of the more extreme tech explorations to life extension. Being fantastically rich is exceptionally conducive to wanting to live as long as possible. Any technology their funding leads to isn't going to stay bottled up for long. More fundamentally, there seems to be a sort of odd reasoning with these arguments that if X amount of current funding for healthcare, no matter how incredibly huge, doesn't achieve Y results to fix an endless number of hard medical problems, it must be because someone is siphoning off needed funding. Considering how much funding healthcare gets already, at least allow that the problem might just be one of extremely difficult problems that won't be solved too easily regardless of how much money is thrown at them..
- geraneum 2y ago
  sometimes I read these sentiments in 2025, and read about “Shanidar 1” who lived ~50k years ago and just feel… sad.
  - ljf 2y ago
    Id never heard of them - for others they were a Neanderthal whose remains show signs of healing and treatment for various ailments, that could have killed them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanidar_Cave https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanidar_Cave
- idiotsecant 2y ago
  I suspect this is an intentionally edgy take but I'll bite. Basic research has proven thousands of times to be a force multiplier in everything, healthcare included. The reason we do this (if you're strictly looking at it from a sociopaths point of view) is that it benefits the next generation of design when we learn why these ones break. The reason you should want to do it if you have a functioning human soul is to lessen the suffering of others if you have the ability to do so.
stavros 2y ago
Health economics is a fairly large field, and there are tradeoffs everywhere. Generally, you try to maximise quality-adjusted life years gained, which for rare diseases doesn't tend to win. If you can give one person ten good years for a million in a rare disease, you can give ten people twenty good years in a less rare disease, so those tend to get more funding.
- wenwolf 2y ago
  True, but rare disease treatments have little to do with artificial hearts, they are a treatment for a very common disease but at an impractical state for most candidates.

rossant 2y ago

> An Australian man with heart failure has become the first person in the world to walk out of a hospital with a total artificial heart implant. So... Why don't they mention Carmat?

aithrowawaycomm 2y ago
This was very unclear in the article - typically artificial hearts have external pumps and motors, the internal component is basically a fancy valve to manage flow/oxygenation correctly. But this one has an internal pump and motor, like a real heart, but with an external battery pack. (The battery currently only lasts four hours...I am too absent-minded to be trusted with this!) This article was a bit more clear: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-12/sydney-hospital-artificial-heart-implant-operation-success/105036154 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-12/sydney-hospital-artif...
- viraptor 2y ago
  Only four hours? That sounds problematic for sleep...
  - mog_dev 2y ago
    You can probably use an external power supply when you are not moving
supermatt 2y ago
I guess it’s to do with what is considered “artificial”? Carmat uses bovine pericardium to line blood contacting surfaces.