Berlin Heart

Short answer: The Berlin Heart EXCOR Pediatric is a pulsatile, air-driven ventricular assist device (VAD) that keeps infants and children with severe heart failure alive, usually while they wait for a heart transplant.

It's paracorporeal: one or two blood pumps sit outside the body on the chest wall, connected by cannulas (tubes) through the skin to the heart's atrium or ventricle and to the great arteries. Each pump is a clear chamber split by a flexible membrane. A driving unit pushes and pulls air behind the membrane, so blood is drawn in and pushed out, and valves keep it flowing one way. Pumps come in small sizes for babies. The device grew out of the German Heart Institute Berlin. In 1990, its surgeons kept an 8-year-old boy alive on an adult-sized 50 mL pump until a transplant, and in 1992 an infant system with a 10 mL pump was implanted there for the first time. On December 16, 2011, the US FDA approved the EXCOR Pediatric under a Humanitarian Device Exemption as a bridge to transplant, after a 17-hospital study led by Texas Children's Hospital. The approved system uses the stationary Ikus driver. The smaller, battery-powered EXCOR Active driver weighs about 15 kg and runs at least 5 hours on batteries. In the US it's still an investigational device used under an FDA-approved study that began in November 2022. A 2026 JACC report found no major device malfunctions among its first 40 study patients. The footage shows a red blood pump with its connectors and a clear pump chamber lying on a hospital blanket.

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