Project description
Treating dangerous blood clots may soon be much easier and less expensive
A kidney stone is painful but rarely deadly. Treatments range from simply drinking lots of water to surgery in difficult cases. When it comes to clots in veins deep in the body (deep vein thrombosis), things are vastly different. Large clots can break free and lodge in the pulmonary arteries, blocking them with often lethal results. Powerful thrombolytics are administered during extended hospital stays as treatment but these are associated with a significantly higher risk of bleeding. VETEX is bringing a revolutionary new treatment to market to enable removal of a clot, minimising the use of thrombolytic drugs. Success will reduce the burden on healthcare systems and improve the lives of millions.
Objective
Deep Vein Thrombosis is the 3rd leading cardiovascular disease behind heart attack and stroke with 1.2M cases diagnosed each year in the EU and US.
Left untreated, one third of DVT patients will be at risk of clot breaking away causing a Pulmonary Embolism which has a 50% mortality rate. In addition, significant chronic complications often occur such as clot recurrence (30%), chronic limb swelling associated with Post Thrombotic Syndrome (50%), ulceration and amputation.
DVT patients are usually treated with drugs. Anticoagulation therapy alone helps prevent clot extension but it does not remove the clot. Other therapies often involve long hospital stays and often require 24-72 hours in ICU due to the significant bleeding risks associated with heavier duty clot busting (Thrombolytic) drugs. The results are poor for patients with large occulsive clots and who are at risk of bleeding, and extremely expensive for healthcare providers.
Vetex Medical is an early stage medical device based in Ireland that has developed a platform technology that rapidly removes high volumes of clot form the deep veins without the use of thrombolytic drugs, and so will radically challenge the inefficiencies and economics present in the current management of deep vein thrombosis.
Deep Vein Thrombosis in the larger veins of the upper limb represents $600m market opportunity. Interventions in the treatment of DVT have been increasing steadily over the last number of years with growth rates of 15%. This market segment is increasingly ‘on trend’ and set to witness expedited growth over the coming years.
Vetex Medical is ambitious in its’ plan to bring the FreeFlow technology to market in both Europe and the US in 2021, through completion of a Clinical Trial and through securing regulatory approvals to allow market entry. The Vetex Medical Team has the skills and experience to develop and commercialise this novel medical technology and to implement a high
growth strategy.
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinator
H91 FC85 GALWAY
Ireland
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.