Engineers, doctors at UCLA develop novel material that could help fight arterial disease
Nov 25, 2009 - 5:00:00 AM
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I immediately saw the promise that thin-film Nitinol had for intravascular and cardiac applications, said Dr. Daniel Levi, a pediatric cardiologist at Mattel Children's Hospital UCLA and a principal investigator on the team. Greg and I started working together immediately on stents and a heart valve.
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By University of California - Los Angeles,
[RxPG] A fortuitous discovery that grew out of a collaboration between UCLA engineers and physicians could potentially offer hope to the nearly 10 million Americans who suffer from peripheral arterial disease.
Also known as hardening of the arteries, peripheral arterial disease, or PAD, is a common circulatory problem in which narrowed arteries reduce blood flow to the limbs. The condition is considered a red flag for vascular disease, heart attack and stroke, and its progression can result in the loss of limbs or death.
While there are currently several treatments for PAD, including balloon angioplasty, stenting and bypass surgery, devices used in the latter two can frequently cause thrombosis, in which clots form inside blood vessels, obstructing blood flow and leading to serious complications.
Now, a team from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, in collaboration with researchers from the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, is working to develop a PAD treatment device that can prevent thrombosis in small-diameter blood vessels.
Their research centers on stents that incorporate a material known as Nitinol, a superelastic nickel and titanium alloy that has the ability to be deformed and to recover its original shape upon heating.
In recognition of the potential of the research, the National Institutes of Health's National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute recently awarded the team a $1 million Challenge Grant.
What we've been doing at UCLA for the last five to 10 years now is working with thin-film Nitinol, said Greg Carman, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and lead investigator for the multidisciplinary research team, which was organized under the umbrella of the UCLA Center for Advanced Surgical and Interventional Technologies.
Nitinol, discovered back in the 1960s, is a shape-memory material. They thought it was going to revolutionize the engineering field. It wasn't until 1985 that people began to think this material would probably be great to use in a stent, Carman said. The reason they liked it for a stent is because you could bend the material a very large distance and it would return back to its original shape. Other metals, such as surgical steel, do not allow such a large shape recovery and, as such, cannot be used in many stenting devices.
In the early 2000s, Carman's group started looking into making thin-film Nitinol and accidently stumbled across a way to fabricate what they believed was very high-quality, uniform-composition Nitinol.
That's when we started producing thin-film Nitinol. We weren't sure where the applications for this novel, very low-profile material would go until we ran into someone in the medical school, Carman said.
I immediately saw the promise that thin-film Nitinol had for intravascular and cardiac applications, said Dr. Daniel Levi, a pediatric cardiologist at Mattel Children's Hospital UCLA and a principal investigator on the team. Greg and I started working together immediately on stents and a heart valve.
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