A revolution began in my professional career and education in 1997. In that year, I visited the University of Minnesota to discuss collaborative opportunities in cardiac anatomy, physiology, and medical device testing. The meeting was with a faculty member of the Department of Anesthesiology, Professor Paul Iaizzo. I didn't know what to expect but, as always, I remained open minded and optimistic. Little did I know that my life would never be the same...During the mid to late 1990s, Paul Iaizzo and his team were performing anesthesia research on isolated guinea pig hearts. We found the work appealing, but it was unclear how this research might apply to our interest in tools to aid in the design of implantable devices for the cardiovascular system. As discussions progressed, we noted that we would be far more interested in reanimation of large mammalian hearts, in particular, human hearts. Paul was confident this could be accomplished on large hearts, but thought that it would be unlikely that we would ever have access to human hearts for this application. We shook hands and the collaboration was born in 1997.
In the same year, Paul and the research team at the University of Minnesota (including Bill Gallagher and Charles Soule) reanimated several swine hearts. Unlike the previous work on guinea pig hearts which were reanimated in Langendorff mode, the intention of this research was to produce a fully functional working heart model for device testing and cardiac research.