First artificial heart implanted in Pittsburgh 40 years ago spurred decades of advances

This story by Anya Sostek originally appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Sunday, October 26. Click here to read the article. 

When he thinks back to Oct. 24, 1985, Harvey Borovetz recalls the throng of doctors and engineers in the operating room, with a security guard assigned to keep onlookers out.

He can picture the 400-pound air compressor, the floppy disks running a Compaq computer and, most importantly, the 47-year-old factory worker in surgery receiving the first artificial heart in Pittsburgh.

“You know, I can hardly remember what I had for breakfast,” said Dr. Borovetz, distinguished professor and former chair of the department of bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering, “but there’s not one second of what happened 40 years ago that I don’t remember.”

That landmark surgery four decades ago launched UPMC as one of the most successful and innovative mechanical heart programs in the country. Since, UPMC has not only performed 2,050 implantations of mechanical hearts, now at a pace of nearly 100 per year, but has contributed crucial engineering breakthroughs in their design. 

Back in 1985, Dr. Thomas Starzl had helped establish UPMC as a world class center for heart transplants — so much so that it was struggling to find organs for all the people who wanted to come to Pittsburgh for heart transplants.

To manage those waiting, transplant surgeon Bartley Griffith had an idea. The first successful artificial heart implantation had taken place three years before at the University of Utah, with a device called the Jarvik heart, envisioned as a permanent heart replacement. But what if that artificial heart was just used temporarily, to buy time for patients to wait for a transplant?

A bridge to transplantation

Hospital leadership gave the green light and, for months, Dr. Griffith and his team flew back and forth to Utah to learn about the Jarvik heart and how to implant it. The device was large — too large, in fact, to be implanted into most women or even smaller men — and powered by an air compressor the size of a washing machine.

Doctors in Pittsburgh weren’t the only ones pursuing the idea of the artificial heart as a bridge to transplant. And ultimately, other cities did it just a little bit earlier. In August 1985, doctors in Arizona successfully implanted the Jarvik heart in a patient who received a transplant nine days later.

In October, an artificial heart developed at Penn State, known as “the Penn State heart,” was implanted into a 44-year-old man awaiting a transplant. A different pump entirely would be implanted in San Francisco about a week later as a bridge to transplant.

By that fall, doctors in Pittsburgh believed they were ready. And on Oct. 24, they had a patient, 47-year-old Thomas Gaidosh, whose heart was deteriorating so quickly that he was not expected to survive the day.

To give him more time to wait for a donor heart, they implanted the Jarvik heart. The procedure lasted six hours, with Gaidosh’s diseased heart removed and the new one implanted.

“It was certainly a marvelous experience of just doing it for the first time,” said Dr. Borovetz. “It was so exciting. We were, from the beginning, trying to learn the strengths and weaknesses of this technology.”

A Chicago Tribune article at the time listed the Penn State recipient as the world’s 10th artificial heart recipient and Gaidosh as the 11th. At Penn State, the heart recipient died of an infection 10 days after the heart was implanted, before a new heart was transplanted.

For Gaidosh at Pitt, while there were some complications, the operation was a success: A heart became available for him four days later and he lived with it for eight years, eventually dying of stomach cancer.

Next steps: VADs

In the next two-and-a-half years, UPMC would implant 15 more Jarvik hearts with mixed results: Seven out of the 16 patients were still alive in 1989. Both at UPMC and nationally, the focus began to shift from complete heart replacement to VADs, or ventricular assist devices, which leave the heart in place but mechanically pump blood from one or both chambers to the aorta or pulmonary artery.

LVADs, or left ventricular mechanical assist devices, were approved by the FDA for general use in 1994.

A year later, Andrea McConaughy arrived at what was then Presbyterian-University Hospital, now UPMC Presbyterian, flown from her home in Ohio. Diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy as a teenager, Ms. McConaughy had been told that she would likely need a heart transplant at some point. She led a normal life until age 24, when, getting ready for work one morning, her right arm went limp. She was able to call her parents in Pittsburgh, who initially thought the voice on the call was her grandmother, who had had a stroke the year before.

The situation was serious enough that her doctor in Pittsburgh ordered that a helicopter fly her to Presby, where she was diagnosed with a transient ischemic attack, a warning sign for a stroke and also a sign that her heart was deteriorating.

Ms. McConaughy was able to leave the hospital, moving back in with her parents in Franklin Park while she waited for a heart transplant. For months, her heart function worsened. Admitted to the hospital in February 1996, the doctors told her parents her heart couldn’t keep her alive much longer. “They had one option for me, and that’s where the LVAD came in,” she said. “They said it was a 50-50 shot, but it was pretty much the last resort I had.” 
 

While the VADs at the time weren’t quite as intrusive as a total artificial heart, they still required the patient to be connected at all times to a washing machine-sized console powering the device.

‘Like a machine that would milk a cow’

Landon Shaw was 16 in 2000 when he received an emergency BiVAD implantation, which pumps for both ventricles of the heart. Mr. Shaw, now 41, had been flown to Pittsburgh from a hospital near his home on a beef farm in Bedford County. 
 

The device wasn’t even approved for children, but Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh was connected to Presby at the time and doctors decided to try it as a last resort.

“Being a farm boy, it literally sounded and felt like a machine that would milk a cow,” said Mr. Shaw, who now lives in Sewickley. “You had these great big plastic things that looked like big snails, with hoses right underneath my rib cage, pulling the blood in and out of my body.”

Mr. Shaw received a successful heart transplant after just four days on the mechanical heart.

Landon Shaw, who at 16 was placed on an artificial heart before receiving a transplant, stands outside the Montour Heights Country Club in Coraopolis on Friday, Oct. 24, 2025. (Giuseppe LoPiccolo/Post-Gazette) 

For Ms. McConaughy, all the equipment would be part of her life for awhile. She spent 156 days in the hospital on an LVAD waiting for her transplant.

As she recovered from the successful heart transplant, it was actually jarring to no longer hear the machine that had kept her alive for so long.

“There was constant ticking — it was like, ‘tick, tick, tick, tick,’” she said. “I got my transplant and I was in the room, and I didn’t hear that. And then I understood that all I had to do was put my hand on my chest to hear the heartbeat.”

As UPMC began to implant more and more LVADs in the 1990s, it found ways to deal with patients such as Ms. McConaughy, who improved rapidly with the mechanical heart but remained tethered to the hospital waiting for their transplants.

In 1990, UPMC made history by allowing one of those patients to leave. At age 15, Brian Williams had come to Presby from Augusta, Ga., to receive a mechanical heart. He recovered so well that doctors weren’t sure what to do with him.

“Brian was somebody that really tested the limits of the technology,” said Steve Winowich, senior adviser to the UPMC Artificial Heart Program and an engineer there since 1988. “He had rehabilitated so well that it was hard to keep him contained in the hospital.”

They decided to try to send Williams “home” to Family House near the hospital so that he could live there with his family. And for months, they worked to figure out how to move him — and the 400-pound box powering his LVAD.

There were technical considerations, such as how to move him from his second-floor room if there was a fire and the elevator broke down. They installed an antistatic carpet, because the console needed to be pushed on wheels and they worried that static could interfere cause a malfunction.

An engineer moved into a room across the hall, using a baby monitor to make sure there were no problems. Federal regulators came to inspect the Family House, and eventually the hospital got FDA approval for Williams to become the first patient anywhere to leave the hospital on an LVAD.

“The ultimate goal has always been to go beyond the walls of the hospital,” said Dr. Winowich, who became so close with Williams that he was a groomsman in his wedding. “If you are developing a technology that someone can’t live a good life on, it really doesn’t serve a purpose.”

Ms. McConaughy didn’t go home with her LVAD, but she also benefitted from some creative engineering. She believes that she was the first LVAD patient to be allowed to take a shower, which she remembers as a glorious, 40-minute affair.

Engineers also devised a way for her to go see her beloved Pittsburgh Penguins in a playoff game, constructing temporary scaffolding at the Civic Arena to allow them to maneuver the pump’s giant power system and bringing an entire spare pump in case hers malfunctioned.

“We had people who went to the movies, we had one young fellow who wanted to go out to the bar,” said DR. Borovetz. “That’s where our engineers have been so spectacular.”

Ms. McConaughy also became so close to the staff at Presby that one of the cardiac intensive care nurses was one of her bridesmaids.

Pushing medical science forward

While the engineers at Pitt enjoyed figuring out how to improve the quality of life for patients on bulky LVAD machines, their greater concern — and scientific contribution — was improving the LVADs themselves.

One giant step toward those innovations started with a patient in need of a heart transplant.

William McGowan was the chairman of MCI, the then-telecommunications giant, and his heart was failing as he recovered from a heart attack. Out of all transplant hospitals, he chose to travel to Pittsburgh in hopes of a transplant.

At one point as he waited for a heart, he became so ill that doctors discussed with him whether an artificial heart device would be necessary. And though a heart arrived in time for him to avoid it, the idea of the technology stuck with him.

Mr. McGowan later donated $1 million to UPMC — followed by a flood of local matching donations — to establish the McGowan Center for Artificial Organ Development, now called the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

That funding helped engineers and doctors at Presby in the quest for a smaller LVAD: one that was more portable for patients who wanted to leave the hospital, with fewer risks of strokes and infections.

The answer came through a partnership with a California company originally founded for aerospace engineering.

Previously, those building artificial hearts had tried to mimic the structure of the heart itself, meaning that a chamber was required to actually store and pump blood.

“They had a totally different concept for how you should pump blood,” said Dr. Borovetz. “You don’t need those sacs, those one-way flow valves.”

Instead, the new invention moved the blood continuously through a rotary pump, allowing for a much smaller and more efficient device. After about a decade of development, Dr. Griffith and UPMC surgeon Robert Kormos implanted the first “HeartMate II” LVAD into a patient in Israel.

The device quickly became the standard for LVADs and has since been implanted into more than 20,000 people, including former Vice President Dick Cheney and Hall of Fame baseball player Rod Carew.

Further innovation came from engineers at Pitt when they improved that LVAD by adding magnetic levitation, resulting in FDA approval of the HeartMate 3 in 2017. Today, UPMC has a subsidiary consulting company, Procirca, which advises people all over the world on artificial heart technology.

For more than a decade, engineers in Pittsburgh, spearheaded by Pitt and Cornell professor Jim Antaki, have also been working to shrink the size of the pump for use in children, designing a pump the size of an AA battery.

“There is an enormous market for adult technology, but when you are talking about an infant or a small child, there’s really no market, or the tiniest of markets,” said Dr. Borovetz. “There are children born with congenital heart disease and they need either mechanical assistance or heart transplantation to sustain their lives. For many years, our team has been looking at this issue. And that’s one of the nice things about being in academia; we can work on projects that don’t have a lot of commercial value.”

In just the past five years, the use of LVADs has continued to evolve. A new type of pump can be implanted through an artery rather than through open heart surgery.

That pump, called the Impella, requires patients to remain hospitalized in the ICU. But because the implantation is a more minor procedure, the pumps are used earlier when patients aren’t as sick, and they are sometimes able to recover on their own without a transplant.

“We’ve found that if we can get the patient supported quicker by using these temporary devices, we can prevent renal failure, liver failure, with less time in the ICU and less time in the hospital,” said Gavin Hickey, medical director of the Ventricular Assist Device Program at UPMC. “Our understanding of these technologies is growing exponentially.”

LVADs still are not fully implantable, meaning that the power source remains outside the body. A fully implantable LVAD “would be the holy grail,” said Dr. Hickey.

But even if the holy grail still awaits, it’s been decades of progress toward getting there.

“The 40th anniversary means a lot to us,” said Dr. Borovetz. “From that first day, with the floppy disks and the air cylinders and whatnot – it’s just such an amazing story.”

First Published: October 26, 2025, 4:00 a.m.
Updated: October 27, 2025, 10:14 a.m.