Marv and Carol Vandermolen’s home sits quietly in a town just outside of Kalamazoo.
“By the time I retired, I knew there was a problem," said Marv, who learned that problem was cardiomyopathy -- a condition of heart disease that causes the heart to become weak and enlarged.
The heart became so large and so weak it just couldn't sustain him. What they thought was going to be a peaceful and calm retirement became anything but -- Marv needed a heart transplant.
After two years of waiting, Marv was getting a second chance at life, something that brought tears to the eyes of his wife when she learned the news.
"When the heart came it was just a miracle," she said.
But there was a complication.
Marv's heart had grown to nearly three times the size of a normal human heart, which meant it would take much longer for the transplant surgery.
“When you take a heart out of a body and put it on ice what it basically does is it dies slowly," said Dr. Martin Strueber, a transplant surgeon with Spectrum Health. He says there is a window of four hours from donor to recipient for a heart transplant, and he knew he would need more time.
So Strueber enrolled Marv in the EXPAND Heart clinical trial, informally known as heart in a box.
“Actually, I think this device may have saved his life," Strueber said. "Because it took us so long more than seven hours and with the usual cold storage, we would have been running out of time."
Spectrum Health is one of eight centers in the U.S. participating in the clinical trial, which uses a device called the organ care system that keeps a heart beating after being removed, lengthening the time it can remain outside the body.
“It gets put in the device and the device allows it to be infused with warm oxygenated blood and beating, so it's beating almost the entire time it's out of the one body and into the other," said Dr. Theodore Boeve. He is in charge of the team that monitors the heart while enroute for transplant.
"The organ care system is about the size of a dishwasher."
And fits neatly in an SUV. Boeve admits at times it's a little like a science fiction movie: "It seems a little crazy you can see the heart beating."
The organ care system not only saved Marv's life but possibly the lives of others just like him.
"We're hoping it will allow us to harvest more heart," Boeve said. "We hope it will allow us to travel a little further. We think we can possibly do a better job of selecting hearts."
And giving patients like Marv hope.
"... He was lucky and we were lucky that we had this device available so we could keep the heart beating outside of the body for such a long time."
Strueber adds that Spectrum Health plans to continue to enroll patients in the EXPAND Heart clinical trial with hope the organ care system can continue to provide more hearts to those who need them.
The list of the centers participating in the clinical trial include:
- Cedars Sinai Med Center
- U-C Medical Center in Los Angeles
- University of Michigan
- Duke Medical Center
- University of Washington
- Spectrum Health
- University of Minnesota Medical Center
- Massachusetts General Hospital
About 70 percent of hearts from organ donors can't be used and many times the reason is because the distance is too far for the organ to travel. This trial changes that allowing for a larger area of viable donor hearts.