Жена фермера пожертвовала $100 тыс. на разработку биосовместимых клапанов сердца

Heart valve replacement research donation made in deceased UP farmer’s name CHATHAM, Mich. (WLUC) - A Chatham woman made a sizeable donation to Michigan State University to develop technology she hopes will save people from the heart condition that killed her husband. Now, researchers are making strides. Chatham resident Karen Bahrman says her husband, David Bahrman, had a strong love for farming. However, his heart couldn’t keep up. After six open-heart surgeries over five decades to correct his aortic valve, he didn’t survive the last one at 67 years old. “He has had, or he had, every type of currently available prosthetic,” Karen said. “He had animal tissue, he had mechanical and he had a homograft, which is human cadaver tissue.” Karen says heart valve replacements have problems with longevity and are susceptible to infection, so she donated $100,000 dollars and committed half of her estate to the Michigan State University Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering. Director Christopher Contag says the institute is researching 3D-printed live tissue heart valves with one of the only high-resolution live tissue printers in the country. He says they’re developing a system that mimics blood flow through the heart to test how well the printed heart valve replacements work in a model. “This gift will allow us to pull all these fields together, so we can, in one 3D printed matrix, provide living cells that would replace the damaged cells, provide immune regulators that would prevent the regenerated valve from being rejected.” Karen says the world doesn’t necessarily need better surgeons but better tools. “Other patients and other patients’ families don’t have to go through something like this where they’re just thrown into a medical crisis every 10 to 15 years and just do it over and over again until it becomes unsurvivable,” she said. She says it may not be commercialized in her lifetime, but hopefully it’ll be there for people like her husband in the future. “It’s important to everyone who has heart valve disease because the problem is, there are only so many of those surgeries one can survive, and reducing the need for multiple surgeries is really where it’s at,” Karen said. She says David would be glad to see this being done on his behalf. You can also contribute to the David Bahrman Tissue-Engineered Heart Valve Research and Development Fund here. The video above will feature the TV6 livestream until staff can clip the corresponding story, if available, from broadcasts or other TV6 content. You can subscribe to our YouTube page or download TV6+ to stream the latest local news and weather. Copyright 2026 WLUC. All rights reserved.