The artificial heart developed by Associate Professor Do Thanh Nho, capable of simulating movement, blood pressure and flow like a real heart, will contribute to saving people with heart disease.
As one of the speakers giving an inspirational speech at the opening session of VinFuture Science Week 2025, on the morning of December 2, Associate Professor Do Thanh Nho, 40 years old, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, brought many emotions to the audience when introducing the artificial heart developed by him and his research team.
He said that since 2021, when working at several hospitals in Sydney, he and his research team pursued a seemingly impossible question: “Can humans regenerate the heart outside the body?”.
That question was asked because at that time, clinical cardiologists were very concerned because many patients using artificial heart valves and heart pumps developed complications after implantation. They want to have an artificial heart that resembles a patient’s heart, allowing them to try transplantation and check if there are complications or dangerous parameters before performing it on the patient. This is the reason Dr. Nho started researching artificial hearts using the same soft robot technology that his lab pioneered.
Associate Professor Do Thanh Nho and the artificial heart researched and developed by him and his team. Image: Minh Son
The artificial heart he developed includes the left ventricle, left atrium and aorta, built from MRI, CT, and ultrasound data of each patient. This heart reproduces the parameters of a real heart, supporting the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases.
When it comes to artificial heart research, Associate Professor Nho does not talk about his own journey, but about the patients – people who, according to him, are “living with heart failure”, waiting for the development of technology to be saved because the source of donated hearts is very limited.
Associate Professor Nho said that each heart is different in shape, muscle fibers, and elastic properties of tissue, making general heart models unable to accurately simulate the pathology. “Doctors are forced to plan surgery based on static images,” he said. This creates an information gap and forces them to make decisions under high-risk conditions.
The human heart beats 60-100 times per minute and in 70 years can reach 2.5-3 billion beats. A healthy heart pumps 5-6 liters of blood every minute, equivalent to about 200 million liters of blood in a lifetime. But that persistence doesn’t exist in everyone.
A stroke occurs when blood to the brain is blocked. Heart valve disease causes blood to flow backward. Myocardial infarction only starts from a small blockage but can lead to death very quickly. Not only that, many other diseases also lead to heart failure.
But even with modern intervention techniques, risks still exist. With mitral valve regurgitation, half of the patients are not suitable for open surgery and must undergo percutaneous intervention. However, up to 40% experience obstruction after valve replacement. “How to predict risks and choose the right patients?”, he asked.
With heart failure, out of 64 million patients in the world, only 4,000 receive heart transplants each year. Many people have to use a left ventricular assist pump (LVAD), but 43% of cases may experience right ventricular failure after transplantation. According to Associate Professor Nho: “If we can build a patient’s heart outside the body, we can know in advance what will happen when the device is inserted.”
In that context, the “soft beating artificial heart” model developed by his team brings hope to people with heart failure globally. The device is made from highly elastic materials, simulating twisting, contraction and blood flow movements like a real heart. When personalized according to each patient’s data, the model helps doctors check, simulate and evaluate risks before entering the operating room.
Operation of artificial heart. Video:Research team
According to Associate Professor Do Thanh Nho, artificial hearts help test artificial heart valves, train intervention techniques, develop surgical tools and predict device effectiveness before implantation. Another important application is to simulate heart failure with preserved ejection fraction – a disease that accounts for 50% of heart failure cases but is difficult to reproduce. “By controlling the relaxation of the heart muscle, we can recreate pressures identical to those of real patients,” he explains.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death, affecting more than 19 million people, accounting for more than 30% of deaths, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). By 2050, the number of cardiovascular disease cases could increase to 729.5 million. In Vietnam, each year there are about 261,000 deaths due to cardiovascular disease. It is estimated that between 300,000 and 1.6 million Vietnamese people are living with heart failure. “My goal is to contribute to changing the future of health care in the coming decades,” said Associate Professor Do Thanh Nho.
Born in Go Dau, Tay Ninh, in a farming family, Associate Professor Nho studied in the Talented Engineering class at Ho Chi Minh City Polytechnic University, then did a doctorate in surgical robotics at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) and was a post-doctoral fellow in the US.
Now, he is an Associate Professor of Scientia at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, co-Director of the school’s Medical Robotics Laboratory. He is also an inventor with 12 international patents, some of which have been licensed or commercialized.