Harnessing the cardiac energy to power leadless intracardiac pacemakers

About This Grant

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. Leadless intracardiac pacemakers, an alternative to traditional pacemakers, are effective for treating heart block and ventricular dysrhythmias, but their utility is limited by short battery life, with over 40% failing within three years. This is problematic as pacemaker recipients now live an average of over 15 years post-implantation, representing a significant mismatch that both clinical practice and quality of life issues. Studies have highlighted various complications, risks, and costs associated with leadless pacemaker implantation, underscoring the urgent need for alternative power solutions for implantable cardiovascular devices to improve patient care. However, existing alternative power solutions, burdened with complications and potential risks, and requiring additional thoracotomies for suturing cardiac energy harvesting (EH) devices onto the heart's surface, are not clinically acceptable. A self-sustainable, clinical translational energy strategy is therefore critically needed to improve the longevity of leadless intracardiac pacemakers. The objective of this project is to develop an innovative clinical translational strategy for cardiac energy harvesting. This involves designing advanced nanomaterials and bistable structures to seamlessly integrate with current leadless pacemaker technology, utilizing unused spaces of pacemaker to convert heartbeat vibrational motions into tens of micro-watts of power output to recharge pacemaker batteries. Our hypothesis is built upon the identification that a leadless pacemaker can maintain the intimate interaction along the heart’s diastole and systole. Thus, integrating piezoelectric cardiac EH devices with a leadless pacemaker is expected to transfer the cardiac motions within right ventricle into the strain of the piezoelectric material and in turn generate electrical power to extend the battery life of pacemakers. In our specific aims, firstly, we will engineer nanostructures with high compressibility, designing novel piezoelectric porous polymers for effective mechanical-electrical conversion. Secondly, we will develop geometrical mechanics designs to leverage heart motions and integrate them with existing leadless intracardiac pacemaker technology. Thirdly, we will systematically design and perform experimental evaluations, considering complex parameters in clinical implementations such as anchor positions, heartbeat effects, and blood flow fluctuations, and test the energy harvesting performance in swine models for clinical validation. The overall approach is ideal for clinical translation since it is compatible with the existing leadless pacemaker implantation techniques and does not require thoracotomy for suturing of cardiac energy harvesters. The proposed project is high risk-high impact, and the research findings will advance knowledge of engineering fundamentals as they apply to biomedical and materials sciences, which will enable significant new opportunities for basic and translational health studies.