October 1, 2009 – Transcatheter heart valve company CardiAQ Valve Technologies (CVT), which is developing the world’s first self-conforming and self-anchoring technology for transcatheter mitral valve implantation (TMVI) system, announced successful results at TCT 2009 from its acute in vivo study.
Joseph E. Bavaria, M.D., vice chief of cardiothoracic surgery, Hospital of Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania, explained the results during the “Mitral Valve Therapies Prior to and in Human Investigation” program at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) 2009 last week. He reported five major outcomes of the acute in vivo study of TMVI:
• Accurate positioning of the implanted valve relative to the mitral valve annulus.
• Secure anchoring of the implanted valve to the mitral anatomy without relying on radial force.
• Preservation of the subvalvular apparatus.
• Conformance of the implanted valve to the mitral annulus to prevent paravalvular leaks.
• Confirmation of a clear, unobstructed left ventricular outflow tract (LVOT).
“Without question, there is an enormous unmet clinical need for the vast majority of patients suffering from mitral regurgitation,” Dr. Bavaria said. “In fact, about 80-90 percent of MR patients suffer from functional MR, a hugely untreated segment of the market that is often too sick to undergo surgery and for whom surgical repair has already been shown to be largely ineffective with recurrent rates of MR around 20 percent. On the other hand, TMVI offers the potential for a nonsurgical solution that could be more effective than transcatheter repair and just as effective as surgical replacement. With TMVI, it appears that simple access along with controlled placement could allow for truly interventional or nonsurgical procedure characteristics, and therefore the existing shortcomings of surgical mitral valve replacement may be mitigated.”
For more information: www.cardiaq.com