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INNOVATION RESOURCES

ExoVasc – External Aortic Root Support

Breakthrough:
Invented by a patient ExoVasc is a heart repair kit that drastically reduces surgery time.

Inventor:
Tal Golesworthy , United Kingdom

Financial reward:
$100,000+

The Story:
ExoVasc – External Aortic Root Support

An engineer from the UK saved his own life with a repair kit he designed for people with a specific type of heart problem.

Tal Golesworthy suffers from Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects the aorta, the main artery carrying oxygenated blood away from the heart. It was in danger of rupturing, and would have caused instant death. However, he was so unenthusiastic about the treatments to correct the condition that he decided to create his own.

Made-to-Measure Invention

Usually the damaged part of the aorta is removed and replaced with an artificial graft. It is a major surgical procedure which takes around 5-7 hours and requires a lifetime on anticoagulant drugs to prevent blood clotting. Golesworthy thought there had to be a better way and eventually came up with his own fix - a made-to-measure knitted polyester sleeve called ExoVasc, which is wrapped around a patient’s aorta.

The ExoVasc offers a number of advantages over traditional techniques. Surgery to implant the device only takes about 2 hours, and the aorta does not need to be cut, and so there is no need for a patient to take drugs to prevent blood clotting. Golesworthy was the first recipient of the device and 19 more patients have followed. The results were so impressive that he teamed up with some of his doctors to create a company to market the invention.

Product Development

Golesworthy is a chemical engineer with a lifetime’s experience of R&D. To develop a new approach to stabilize the aorta he attended an open information day for Marfan patients at St. George’s Hospital. His eyebrows raced northward as he heard a surgeon recount current best practice. He thought the treatments crude as hospitals would use off-the shelf tube grafts. And measurements that an engineer would like to make, such as the tensile strength of the artery could not be made, leaving surgeons to rely on experience. “The doctors were being asked to do an engineering job when they weren’t engineers,” the inventor told one newspaper reporter.

Golesworthy knew the kind of aortic support he wanted and invited Imperial College to help with the computer aided (CAD) design work. He came up with a sleeve that can wrap around the aorta to prevent it from expanding. Each one is created using scans of an individual patient’s aorta and CAD drawing to produce a personalized device.

Surgical Innovations

Innovation in cardiovascular surgery has often relied upon interdisciplinary collaboration between surgeons and engineers and in 2001 leading consultant surgeon Professor John Pepper came on board. In that same year Golesworthy started to raise finance for the project. “To conceive of the idea of an external support was easy: there are any number of armchair inventors about. To build technical and commercial teams, raise the finance, run the project AND volunteer to be the first patient was not so easy.”

With funding secure, engineering the prototypes began in earnest in 2002. Permission for a clinical trial was granted, and in May 2004 the inventor was fitted with his own invention.

The device is still in the experimental stage, but so far 20 patients have been successfully treated, and it has been approved for use by the Royal Brompton Hospital. More patients are booked in for the procedure and the British Heart Foundation welcomes the development, though it won’t recommend ExoVasc until it is sure that it is safe in the long-term.

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