Medical breakthrough
A 72-year-old patient in Sherbrooke helped SoundBite medical solutions, a Saint-Laurent company, take a step towards bringing a new device to treat blocked blood vessels to the market last week—a device developed in partnership with Technoparc.
“We’ve been working on this [device] for 12 years,” said Université de Sherbrooke engineering professor Dr Martin Brouillette. He currently serves as the company’s chief technology officer; Steven Arless is the company’s chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder. Two of Brouillette’s graduate students, Louis-Philippe Riel and Steven Dion are also co-founders.
Things have moved quickly since Arless joined the team about 18 months ago, around the same time that the company moved into the Technoparc. One of the benefits is the address. “I don’t have to tell too many people how to spell Alfred-Nobel,” Arless joked.
Anyone who has had a kidney stone pulverized is familiar with the technology in SoundBite; both treatments use shock waves to break apart something that shouldn’t be in a person’s body. The device creates a shock wave inside a blood vessel to help clear an obstruction, but it is still considered minimally invasive, Arless noted. It is threaded up to a blockage through a small incision.
SoundBite might be used to clear coronary arteries—those in the heart—or in peripheral arteries—for example, those in limbs.
Heat-producing lasers are often used. However, lasers don’t just affect the blockage—it can also hurt healthy tissue. “Shock waves are particularly good at attacking hard material,” Arless said—but shock waves don’t typically impact healthy issue.
Human testing
Last week’s case was a first, as the device was used in a human patient. That means all the other phases were conclusive. “Once all the engineering testing and animal testing has been done […] you go into a first-in-human clinical studies with 10 to 20 subjects,” Arless said.
Ethics of the company’s work is currently overseen by review boards at a few local universities, including the Université de Sherbrooke.
Next, the team hopes to prove the device’s efficacy in a larger, 10-centre clinical trial next year. Facilities in Canada, United States and Europe are expected to participate.
Income from sponsored research is still lower than most other Canadian universities with medical and doctoral programs, but it’s grown by over 200 per cent in the last 15 years, the highest rate of growth according to a 2016 survey from Research InfoSource.
There are about 200,000 bypass procedures and 200,000 amputations done each year due to blocked vessels that prevent blood from flowing properly.
“Just have to do it one step at a time,” Arless concluded.