Bartley P. Griffith, United States

My clinical and investigational work has focused on the treatment of end-stage heart and lung disease. I have approached that task by novel surgeries and immunosuppression in heart and lung transplantation. The clinical burden of insufficient donor organs has been approached by our bioengineering developments in the total artificial heart, ventricular assist devices, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), and ambulatory ECMO. I have been a mentor of cardiothoracic surgical trainees and post doc engineers.
Since 1986, I have been continuously funded as a principal investigator by the NIH. As an example, work on an ambulatory artificial lung, first funded in 1990, has earned more than $25 million in NIH support. The device, once imagined on a napkin, is now cleared by the FDA for clinical use, and the roll-out of the Breethe system designed for home use began in 2021. The work on this system evolved with clinical input from experiences in patients with end-stage respiratory distress but also included multidisciplinary input from a broad array of experts in the bioengineering aspects of the project.
In 2018, I was named Clinical Director for the University of Maryland’s Program in Cardiac Xenotransplantation. The ongoing focus of that program has been translational cardiac xenotransplantation with genetically engineered swine hearts placed in baboons. Success of the program (survival up to nine months in baboons) has led to clinical implementation of the first successful cardiac xenotransplant, January 7, 2022. We performed our second cardiac xenotransplant September 20, 2023.