Richard Wampler 2011 Award Winner

Richard Wampler M.D. 2011 Claire Pomeroy Award Winner Instituted by MedStart in 2010, the Claire Pomeroy Awards recognize and celebrate excellence in med tech innovation by honoring regional inventors whose products have had a global impact in transforming some aspect of medicine for the better. The awards committee received seven nominations in the 2010-11 award cycle, and we are pleased to announce that the winner of this year’s Claire Pomeroy Award is Richard Wampler, M.D. for his innovative efforts in developing the Hemopump, the basis for second generation non-pulsatile left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) like the HeartMate II, to supplement or restore blood flow in patients suffering severe congestive heart failure, and more recently, the HVAD,by HeartWare, in which the pump is more elegantly reduced to a single moving part suspended within the pump housing in the blood and powered entirely by external electro-magnetic fields.

Dr. Wampler’s invention of the Hemopump and its dramatic initial use at the Texas Heart Institute was reported in the New York Times and Time Magazine in 1988. First generation heart pumps had attempted to mimic the beating heart and its pulsing pump action, while the Hemopump demonstrated that a much smaller continuous action pump could drive a substantial amount of blood flow with much less invasiveness required for implantation. Patients on the Hemopump and its descendants can survive with barely any pulse at all. Wampler worked on early iterations of the Hemopump with engineers at the predecessor of Thoratec, Nimbus, Inc. in Rancho Cordova, which had spun out of Aerojet to pursue development of pulsatile LVAD. The idea for the Hemopump occurred to him based on submersible pumps used in water wells he had seen in the Egypt. The later idea to simplify it to run off of magnetic fields was inspired by seeing a spinning top magnetically suspended in a novelty shop. He built the first prototype of the magnetic version in his garage in Granite Bay, and received an NIH grant to advance this work.

Dr. Wampler was a surgical resident at University of Oregon Health Sciences Center, but then turned to emergency medicine. While practicing in the Sacramento region, he took classes in engineering at CSUS, to master the fluid dynamics and other skills needed to develop his pumps. While the recognition is gratifying, he reports that the greatest satisfaction has come when he has been introduced to patients in whom his devices have been successfully implanted, such as occurred at a recent community picnic. Dr. Wampler continues to work on further iterations of his heart pumps, to make them ever smaller and less invasive to implant, so that their benefits might be extended to even sicker patients who could not otherwise survive the procedure, and for treatment of earlier phase heart failure to aid in recovery of heart function.

.SARTA’s and MedStart’s job is to communicate and amplify positive stories like Richard’s throughout our community, so that a strong culture of innovation can take root, and so that the commercialization process can proceed more efficiently and with more of the economic benefit of it retained in our community. The Claire Pomeroy Awards Committee would like to congratulate and recognize Richard, and the 2011 Finalists for their innovative efforts in medical technology enhancements.