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Bartley P. Griffith, MD (he/him/his)

Hales Distinguished Professor of Surgery
University of Maryland
Baltimore, Maryland, United States

Throughout my career, my clinical and investigational work has focused on the treatment of heart and lung end-stage disease. Since 1986, I have been continuously funded as a principal investigator by the NIHIn 1990,Griffith received the first FDA permission to discharge patients on implanted VADs from the hospital. This led to the fully funded $12 million McGowan Center for artificial organ research in 1992. The center evolved key bioengineering developments that led to his assistance of the first in human use on July 27,2000, of the novel rotary Heartmate II VAD at the Sheba Hospital in Tel Aviv (Ann Thorac Surg 2001;71: S116-20). There have been more than 15,000 implants of this breakthrough heart pump which enabled a 63% patient survival at two years.

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.

in2018 Griffith and Muhammad Mohiuddin demonstrated that the heart of a genetically altered pig could support life when transplanted into an orthotopic position t for nine months. On January 7, 2022, Griffith led the team that placed the first successful pig-to-human cardiac transplant into a 57-year-old morbidly ill patient with heart failure. The operation has been hailed as a breakthrough procedure (N Engl J Med June 22, 2022, DOI 10.1056/NEHMoa2201422). Two patients have survived 100 days.
He co-founded Procure OnDemand in 2023 to improve ordan donation

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