Adrian Kantrowitz (October 4, 1918 – November 14, 2008) was an American cardiac surgeon whose team performed the world's second heart transplant attempt (after Christiaan Barnard)[1] at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York on December 6, 1967.
[4] Kantrowitz also invented the intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP), a left ventricular assist device (L-VAD), and an early version of the implantable pacemaker.
Adrian told his mother as a three-year-old that he wanted to be a doctor, and as a child built an electrocardiograph from old radio parts, together with his brother Arthur.
Using dogs and other animals as experimental subjects, Kantrowitz developed an artificial left heart, an early version of an oxygen generator for use as a component in a heart-lung machine and a treatment for coronary artery disease in which blood vessels would be rearranged during surgery.
The device included an external control unit that could adjust the pacing rate from 64 to 120 beats per minute to allow the patient to deal with physical or emotional stress.
[11] Throughout the 1960s, he collaborated with a team that included his brother, engineer Arthur Kantrowitz, on the development of a left ventricular assist device.
Building on his experiments with dogs, he performed the world's second permanent partial mechanical heart implantation in a human on February 4, 1966, which was successful, though the patient died 24 hours after surgery as a result of preexisting liver disease.
This surgery used a valveless device developed with his brother Arthur in which the natural electrical impulses of the patient's heart controlled the action of the pump.
[12] As part of Kantrowitz's research for this project, he conceived of ABO-incompatible heart transplantation,[2] though it would be three decades before it would be put into practice.
A comatose Boyd Rush with a faint pulse had been brought to the hospital several days earlier and when he went into shock and was taken into surgery, Hardy polled the fellow doctors on his team, with three voting yes and one abstaining.
The hospital's public relations department put out a guarded statement, with many of the early newspaper articles making the assumption that the donor was a human.
In addition, when Hardy attended the Sixth International Transplantation Conference several weeks later, he was treated with "icy disdain."
[14][15][16] In what turned out to be a four-way race between South African cardiac surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard and Americans Norman Shumway and Richard Lower, Kantrowitz prepared for a potential human heart transplant by transplanting hearts in 411 dogs over a five-year period together with members of his surgical team.
[17] Barnard performed the first human-to-human heart transplant with an adult donor and recipient on December 3, 1967, at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa.
[20] On December 6, 1967, at Maimonides Medical Center, Kantrowitz's team, including Bjørnstad PG, Lindberg HL, Smevik B, Rian R, Sørland SJ, Tjønneland S, performed the world's first pediatric heart transplant attempt as well as the first human-to-human heart transplant in the United States.
Inserted through the patient's thigh, it was directed into the aorta, and alternately expanded and contracted in order to reduce strain on the heart.