“I was taking a class that covered both technology and medicine, and I learned about a new medical device called the Hemopump,” Siess recalls. “It was the first-ever catheter-based blood pump, manufactured by Johnson & Johnson.” The pump helped treat patients who had suffered a heart attack by drawing blood from the left ventricle into the aorta, which allowed the weakened heart to rest and recover without interrupting blood flow through the body.
As innovative as the Hemopump was then, Siess realized there was room for improvement. “The Hemopump had an external electric motor with a high-speed drive cable connected to the pump head, which was implanted inside the ventricle,” he explains. The motor was large and could overheat, and the high-speed drive cable being bent inside the patient´s vasculature could lead to fractures, which would cause the pump to stop working.
Drawing on his interest in airplanes and aerospace technology, Siess realized a miniature electric motor that connects to the mini turbine-like pump eliminated the need for a high-speed drive cable altogether. The advances on the mini turbine pump helped to reduce the size and increase efficiency, so that the future Impella pumps would be able to provide the same pump flow as the Hemopump at half the size. “A turbine pump is small in size and has the highest known energy density, meaning it can pump the most blood at the smallest size,” he says.
Collaborating with other doctoral students at his university, Siess conducted more preclinical research on improving the Hemopump’s design. With support from his medical technology professor and research grants, he invented a prototype of a new heart pump, which was named Impella.
In 1997, five years after conducting university-based research, Siess took the leap to manufacture the Impella and bring it to market. He cofounded Impella Cardiotechnik, GmbH, in 1997 in Germany, his native country, serving as the R&D manager and chief technology officer. Since then, more than 330,000 people worldwide have been treated with the Impella platform, which now includes the Impella 5.5, CP and RP heart pumps, as well as SmartAssist technology that provides real-time metrics and assistance to healthcare professionals using Impella.
What makes the Impella so groundbreaking is not only its small size, turbine-like pump head and its directly connected miniaturized electric motor, but that it can be inserted via a catheter without having to cut open a patient’s sternum and ribs, which was the conventional protocol for implanting heart pumps. The Impella, because of its small size, is also placed within the heart. This allows the heart to rest and recover. In addition, every Impella pump is equipped with the smallest available pressure sensor technologies built into the pump head. This allows doctors obtain real-time heart data while being on pump support and it provides guidance to better treatment with improved outcomes for patients.
In 2005, Siess’ company was bought by Abiomed, which in turn was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2022—bringing Siess’ work full circle back to the company that created the Hemopump. Today, he’s Executive Vice President, Managing Director and Chief Technology Officer at Abiomed.
Here, Siess shares how he went from a first-generation college student set on pursuing a career in the aerospace industry to the inventor of a cardio device that’s helped restore heart health to hundreds of thousands of patients.
Q:
How did you discover your calling as a scientist innovating in medical technology?
A:
I grew up in Germany in a refugee family and I wanted to go to university and major in aerospace engineering because I always enjoyed airplanes. I ended up getting drafted into the military and realized airplanes weren’t my calling. So I studied general mechanical engineering, which allowed me to explore more medical and tech-heavy topics. My interest grew from there.
Q:
Once you created the Impella, what challenges did you face getting it off the ground?
A:
A critical part of any product is commercialization. Impella launched in Aachen, Germany, with three employees, and we had high hopes for what we could accomplish. But the problem is, medtech development takes much longer than you think, and you’re likely to run out of money.
That’s basically what happened to us when the dot-com bubble burst in the late 1990s. Luckily, we were bought by Abiomed, a company that focused on heart recovery. The company shared the same vision as we did, and I feel lucky that we were acquired.
Q:
What science or health research breakthroughs do you hope to see in your lifetime?
A:
My biggest hope at Johnson & Johnson is to one day use Impella along with a pharmacological approach to heart failure. Patients with advanced heart failure refractory don’t currently have a strong treatment option. For now, the best we do is heart replacement therapy.
In the future, my hope is to provide a combination therapy using Impella to help revert the heart muscle to its normal size, along with complementary drug therapies that can help heart muscle tissues function better. Ideally, this would allow the damaged heart to restructure and thus restore normal functioning.
Q:
What are your interests outside of your work?
A:
I’ve always been a passionate photographer and enjoy taking portraits of people. I love classic cars; growing up, my dad ran a car shop. My oldest cars are a 1971 Alfa Romeo Giulia and a 1985 Chevy Blazer.
As an engineer, I also find myself drawn to rebuilding things. I’ve been renovating a barn on my property. Inside the barn was a big arch door, and I wanted to redo it with a stainless steel frame. Everybody I spoke to told me it couldn’t be done. The stubborn part of me said, “It can be, and I’ll prove it to you.” With hindsight, I regret it because I had to spend four months on my knees, but the door is in and it’s beautiful.
Q:
How do you start your day?
A:
I start with 30 minutes of exercise, then I do the most important thing: have coffee with my wife. I love having this moment to connect with her, as I may not see her for the rest of the day.
Q:
What’s the best career or life advice you’ve ever received?
A:
Stay curious and don’t be afraid of tapping into the unknown. Be willing to learn about different fields, because it’s at the connecting points between fields where innovation takes place. Also, a good, functioning team will always outperform a strong individual.
