Monash Health Cardiothoracic Surgeons Professor Julian Smith, Dr Yi Chen and Dr Aubrey Almeida have received $2.75million of funding – in collaboration with QHeart Medical, Monash University, and the University of Queensland – through a Cooperative Research Centres Projects (CRC-P) grant.
“I was very excited to hear the news, and ready to drive the project forward,” says Dr Almeida. Dr Almeida is a renowned cardiothoracic surgeon with a special interest in minimally invasive and robotic mitral valve surgery. Dr Almeida is also a Senior Lecturer at Monash University and a past President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Cardiac and Thoracic Surgeons.
The CRC-P grant is for research that is an extension on a trial ‘Pilot Study of an Extra Aortic Counterpulsation device (BioQ CA)’ which started at Monash Health in 2021.
The new study will develop an intra-aortic balloon device which offers a non-surgical solution for the treatment of hypertension and hypertensive heart failure. The overall goal is to develop a medical device therapy to address the unmet clinical need of the management of drug resistant blood pressure.
“Resistant Hypertension and Hypertensive Heart Failure are major global health problems with high incidence, no effective treatments, and carry huge costs,” Dr Almeida says.
With age, the aorta stiffens and loses its ability to expand and contract which increases blood pressure. This causes the heart to work harder to supply blood to the body’s organs and tissues, including to the heart muscle itself. Aortic stiffness is a leading cause of high blood pressure and can lead to poor quality of life, heart failure and death.
“We have shown proof of concept using an interventionally delivered ‘pumpless’ intra-aortic balloon device therapy offering a non-surgical solution using passive dampening,” Dr Almeida says.
But there’s still a lot of work ahead for the research team.
“The next steps are to refine the device design and verify performance,” Dr Almeida says. “And then conduct a pilot clinical trial to investigate clinical effectiveness.”
The grant runs from 1 Jan 2022 to 31 Dec 2024 and provides the opportunity to run trials in different patient populations and to partner with other leaders in the field in improving the device.
You can read more about the Cooperative Research Centres Projects grants here.
Approved by Anjali Dhulia
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