ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Four decades ago, researchers changed the way we thought about what causes heart attacks in the identification of vulnerable plaque. But early technology focused mostly on the best way to find the plaque. Now CryoTherapeutics believes it has found a way to treat it.
Belgium-based CryoTherapeutics was founded just over a decade ago when the concept of vulnerable plaque as a cause of heart attacks was one of the hottest topics in interventional cardiology. In those days, the discussions around vulnerable plaque on the part of both medical device companies and physicians was less on how to treat vulnerable plaque than on how to identify patients with plaque that put them at risk for a myocardial infarction, says CryoTherapeutics Founder and CEO John Yianni, PhD.
“The interventional cardiology conferences in those days “were focused on imaging and imaging modalities in order to try to identify these plaques,” he continues. A vulnerable or “hot” plaque is a buildup of plaque inside a coronary artery that is fragile and at risk of rupture from within the vessel wall, causing a blood clot to form resulting in a heart attack.
James Muller, MD, has been a key figure in the discovery and discussion about vulnerable plaque since the very beginning and is known in some circles as the “father of vulnerable plaque.” Today he serves as an advisor to CryoTherapeutics and also works on other medtech start-ups, including SpectraWAVE, which is developing a device that's a combination of near-infrared spectroscopy and optical coherence tomography (OCT) as a potential intravascular means of detecting these plaques.
