Artificial cardiac pacemakers
[Image by By Lucien Monfils – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0]
By the 1950s, pioneers including Dr. C. Walton Lillehei at the University of Minnesota were using pacemakers. Medtronic’s roots go back to co-founder Earl Bakken helping Lillehei by creating a small, external, portable, battery-powered pacemaker.
But it was implantable pacemakers that changed the game, providing an implanted electronic device with the potential keep someone with a cardiac arrhythmia alive for decades. An implantable pacemaker developed by engineer Rune Elmqvist and Dr. Åke Senning became the first to go into a person during a surgery on patient Arne Larsson at Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden in 1958, according to Siemens’ corporate history. Larsson ended up using a total 26 pacemakers through his life, outliving both Elmqvist and Senning by the time of his death in 2001.
Implantable pacemakers were revolutionary, but they may not have become disruptive if not for the American engineer and inventor Wilson Greatbatch, who introduced lithium batteries for the devices in the early 1970s. Manny Villafaña and Anthony Adducci’s Cardiac Pacemakers Inc. (now part of Boston Scientific’s Guidant business) introduced the first pacemaker using lithium battery technology. The battery innovation gave pacemakers the reliability and longevity needed for them to become a standard of cardiac care — and a multibillion-dollar industry.
Implantable pacemakers opened the way for ICDs, neuromodulation devices and other electronics implanted inside humans beings.
Little credit to Dr. Frederic Foley who in the early 1930 some 30 years prior to Dr. Thomas Fogarty placed a balloon on an indwelling urethtal catheter. Confident any work by Dr. Fogarty probably involved a review of a Foley catheter as he began working on his catheter. Actually CR Bard began distributing the Foley catheter in the 1930 as well. Although Paul Raiche with the David Rubber company was awarded the Patent for the device the World would only know the product as The Foley… over 200million are utilized annually.
For a follow up article it would be interesting to track reimbursement policies and medical innovations. Since these policy can “push” innovation. At Poiesis this is why we launched the Duette catheter to reduce CAUTI events. CMS does not pay for never events so we designed a device that lowers rates 13:1 so far over the single balloon Foley. At $11,419 cost per infection it’s a game changer, only brought to the market due to reimbursement policies.
Appreciate the look back, alway good to know the past.
That’s a good point about Dr. Foley, Greg. Fogarty’s work, it seems, was such a game-changer because he figured out how to make balloon catheter work in the vasculature. Surgeons not having to dig around looking for a blood clot — it was a big deal. … That’s interesting about how reimbursement policies enabled the launch of your catheter. Think we’ll see more innovation like this, since CMS is driving toward alternative payment models post-Obamacare?
Certainly these are all game changers, although the first few were probably the biggest game changers ever. Certainly this is a relevant collection of major accomplishments. Thanks for publishing it!!