An Australian man lived for 100 days with an artificial titanium heart while he awaited a donor transplant, the longest period to date of someone with the technology.

An Australian man in his forties has become the first person in the world to leave hospital with an artificial heart made of titanium. The device is used as a stopgap for people with heart failure who are waiting for a donor heart, and previous recipients of this type of artificial heart had remained in US hospitals while it was in place.

The titanium device’s underlying principles were first envisioned in 2001 by a biomedical engineer named Daniel Timms. Timms, a plumber’s son, started by mimicking a human circulatory system using hardware store pipes and valves,