February 23, 2018 — CorFlow Therapeutics AG announced that the company will present new insights into the coronary microcirculation during the 2018 annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology (ACC), March 10-12 in Orlando, Fla.
CorFlow has since its foundation in June 2016 worked to document that the Controlled Flow Infusion (CoFI) technology is able to measure the coronary microvascular status and provide therapy to the compromised coronary microcirculation at the same time. Microvascular obstruction (MVO), also known as the no-reflow phenomenon, affects more than half of the acute heart attack patients and is an independent predictor for complications including heart failure, which constitutes a high cost burden for the worldwide healthcare system. To address this large unmet medical need in interventional cardiology, CorFlow has developed an in-vivo model which reproducibly creates MVO in an occlusion-reperfusion model with very low complication rates. Using this in-vivo model, the CoFI technology was used to measure real-time dynamic microvascular resistance (dMVR) in the coronary circulation and these dMVR values were correlated to post-procedure contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and histology. A correlation between the procedural CoFI dMVR values and post-procedural MRI will enable treatment of MVO before the patients leave the cath lab and potentially reduce the complication rates for severe heart attack patients.
In a comment, Renu Virmani, M.D., an internationally renowned cardiovascular pathologist and co-author of the histology poster, stated: "These findings suggest that the fundamental effects of a human heart attack have to be reconsidered. Our findings show that MVO in acute heart attacks can be created without the presence of thrombi. The results furthermore show that minute reductions in coronary volume flow causes an exponential collapse of the coronary microcirculation and that epicardial revascularization alone is not sufficient to open the collapsed coronary microcirculation. If these findings hold true in our upcoming investigations, we will have to fundamentally rethink the comprehensive treatment of an acute heart attack with attention to the microvasculature as well as the major epicardial vessels."
The data from the CorFlow non-clinical trials will be used in the upcoming submissions for the CorFlow MOCA I (MVO with CoFI System Assessment I) First-in-Man clinical trial.
Read the article "No-Reflow Phenomenon During PCI"
For more information: www.corflow-therapeutics.ch