Peer Portner

Peer Michael Portner (January 8, 1940 – February 9, 2009) was a heart researcher whose work led to the development of the ventricular assist device, an electrical pump that permits patients in heart failure to survive until a heart transplant could be performed.

Portner was born on January 8, 1940, in Mombasa, Kenya. In 1968, he was awarded doctorate in experimental nuclear physics from McGill University in Montreal, which was followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in nuclear physics at the University of Oxford.

He established the Novacor Medical Corporation in the 1980s to construct and distribute the device, serving as its president and chief executive before the company was acquired by Baxter Healthcare Corporation in 1988. After the takeover, Portner served as chairman of Baxter's Novacor division, where he continued to improve the device, making it easier to transport and allowing patients to wash, walk and be outside the hospital for significant periods of time. By the time of Portner's death, an estimated 1,800 Novacor devices had been implanted to allow for a transition to transplants and in other cases, with devices kept in patients for up to six years.

Though the Novacor pump was ultimately not needed, Portner was on hand while President of Russia Boris Yeltsin was undergoing cardiac bypass surgery in 1996, ready to assist in case of emergency.

Portner served as president of the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs. O. H. Frazier, director of cardiovascular surgery research at The Texas Heart Institute in Houston and developer of Thoratec's HeartMate pump, stated that "Peer Portner was an original investigator of a lifesaving technology who contributed to the literature and first generation of these devices."

In 2008, Portner was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology and inducted into their College of Fellows.

Portner died at age 69 on February 9, 2009, at his home in Kensington, California, due to cancer. He was survived by his wife, two daughters; and three grandchildren.