ends up starving vital organs such as the kidneys. Many of these patients can be treated for years with drugs. But about two million Americans require more help than medication can provide—and many of those patients are not sick enough to warrant the invasive surgical procedure needed to implant an LVAD. “And when you’ve exhausted all medical methods of treatment, you need a heart transplant,” Altman says. “There have been only 2,300 transplant a year constant for the last 10 years in the U.S.”
Powered by an external battery connected by wires (future devices may work wirelessly), Procyrion’s micro-pump helps to push the blood along, taking the load off of the heart in doing that work, Delgado says. Doctors should be able to insert it in 10 minutes in an outpatient procedure, at one-tenth the cost of implanting an LVAD.
Procyrion and Delgado hope that in congestive heart failure patients, Aortix could provide enough blood-pumping support to actually slow the heart’s inevitable decline—perhaps even enough to completely eliminate the eventual need for an LVAD. “Even at 20 percent or 30 percent of these patients who would have received an LVAD, this is a major public health improvement and a major cost benefit,” says Delgado. It could make the treatment of heart failure almost as simple as treatments that help other parts of the body to heal, he adds. And the fact that the device is placed downstream of the carotid arteries, which supply the head and neck with blood, eliminates the risk of stroke.
The company has raised about $150,000 in seed funding from Alpha Dev, an early-stage investment company in life sciences now known as Fannin Innovation Studio, for proof of concept studies. Last year, the company also received $3 million in a Series A round from both angel investors and a $1.5 million grant from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.
Aortix has attracted at least one high-profile supporter for its efforts, heart surgeon and medtech inventor William Cohn, director of Center for Technology and Innovation at Texas Heart Institute in Houston and a colleague of Delgado’s. Cohn designed the wire mesh anchors that expand like an umbrella to hold the device in place.
The device, he says, could make the treatment of heart failure far simpler.
“If you have a person who is limping along, they have arthritis of the ankle, that arthritis gets worse and the ankle falls apart,” says Cohn, who is also an Xconomist. “But give them a crutch or a cane earlier in the illness, the ankle will maybe never ever get that bad.” Aortix or Corinnova’s CardiacStar could do the same for an ailing heart.
