Irish Independent Broadsheet – Stem Supplement
Wednesday 14 November 2012
Dr Liam Morris
A heart attack is caused by a lack of blood supply to the heart muscle which restricts the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to the heart. This results from the hardening and narrowing of the coronary arteries which supply the heart muscle with blood.
A build-up of plaque material, primarily composed of cholesterol, on the inside of the arterial wall causes the narrowing of these arteries – this is known as coronary artery disease.
One method of dealing with coronary artery disease is to perform open heart by-pass surgery. However, such surgery is quite invasive. Endovascular methods, in contrast, constitute less invasive treatment.
These methods involve positioning tiny cylindrical metallic meshes, known as stents inside the blocked coronary artery and are frequently the preferred method for treating coronary artery disease.
Stents are usually made from stainless steel and are often laser cut by a computer controlled machine from a hollow cylindrical tube. Various finishing techniques are used to smooth the rough edges.
Coatings such as drugs are normally applied before the stent is collapsed onto a balloon catheter to a size less than one millimeter in diameter and then assembled onto a stent delivery system.
Through an incision made in the femoral artery in the leg, a guidewire is pushed beyond the diseased artery after which the stent delivery system is positioned to the area of the blockage over the guidewire. The balloon is inflated and the stent is expanded to a diameter of between two and four millimetres to re-open the blocked artery.
Since 2006, the GMedTech biomedical research centre at the Galway Mayo Institute of Technology (GMIT), has worked with 30 biomedical device companies in the Galway region in the design, development and testing of medical devices for the treatment of coronary artery diseases and other vascular diseases such as aneurysms (swelling of an artery) and strokes (disturbance of blood flow within the brain) to facilitate a greater insight into the performance and safety of these devices.
A future vision of GMedTech is to provide a clinical training facility for clinicians to practice and assess various surgical procedures, which has the potential to provide relevant clinical data to guide clinicians on the most appropriate surgical technique for a given disease situation.