Langer: Artificial hearts still use ladies' girdle material after 50 years
Bob Langer · a16z Podcast | Mindsets for Engineering Biology · Jan 2, 2019 · at 1:11
MIT Professor Bob Langer discusses the historical origins of biomaterials and drug delivery systems, pointing out how regulatory path dependency maintains early off-the-shelf choices.
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“If you wanted to make an artificial heart, what the clinicians did in 1967 is they said, well, what object in your house has a good flex life like a heart? And they came up with the idea of a lady's girdle. So they looked at what that was made out of, and It's a polyether urethane, and then they decided they'd use the exact same material to make the artificial heart. That was 1967, but now 50 years later, that's still what it's made out of, because once you start down that path from like a FDA regulatory standpoint, it's hard to change.”
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