Kevin K. Cheng

Kevin K. Cheng (born around 1945), developed the Phoenix total artificial heart, first used in a human in 1985 in an emergency in a person whose donor heart was being acutely rejected. Cheng was a dentist by profession and the Phoenix heart he designed was originally developed to be implanted into a young cow. The recipient Thomas Creighton, who was dying from a failing heart, survived the artificial heart operation and 11 hours later a human heart was transplanted. The cause of death less than two days afterwards was not due to the artificial heart.

Cheng had fled China with his family at the age of four, spent his childhood and completed his education in Taiwan and then settled in the United States. His past time of designing artificial hearts took him from Texas to Phoenix, where he developed artificial hearts for transplantation into cows.