ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Chicago-based Flow Medical is combining insights from interventional cardiology and radiology to improve catheter-delivered thrombolysis to treat pulmonary embolisms.
Flow Medical is innovating catheter-based thrombolysis to address pulmonary embolism (PE) with a novel device that precisely delivers tissue-type plasminogen activator (tPA), a protein that breaks down the thromboembolisms––blood clots––that cause PE.
About 600,000 people are treated for PE in the US every year and the mortality rate has been stuck at around 15% for the last 20 years. It is the third leading cause of cardiovascular death and the leading cause of preventable in-hospital mortality, according to the company.
Low-risk PE patients can be treated with heparin and monitoring to prevent cardiopulmonary decompensation. High-risk patients are too unstable to undergo an intervention, so they are treated with systemic thrombolytic drugs. Flow is focused on the group in between––intermediate-risk patients who can withstand a catheter intervention to remove a clot in the pulmonary vasculature. That group includes about 250,000 patients in the US each year.
