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Shape Memory Polymer Foams as Treatment for Aneurysms

Duncan Maitland, associate professor in the Texas A&M University's Department of Biomedical Engineering, discusses an innovative method for treating potentially fatal brain aneurysms. Maitland is developing the treatment, which involves filling the aneurysms with special plastics called polyurethane-based shape memory polymer foams.

Topics:
Drug Delivery Materials Medical Plastics

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    Transcript

    00:00:04 Hi, I’m Duncan Maitland. I’m an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University. The motivating factor that drives me is the ability to take diseases or clinical problems that don’t have solutions or don’t have good solutions and develop technologies from whiteboard concept and take it into humans. The way that that motivation, the motivation to impact health care translates into the research that’s in my lab is through attacking clinical problems, bringing in whatever technologies we need. That has resulted in kind of a platform technology, if you will, which is the shape memory polymers. And I have been applying shape memory polymers since 1995 to treating stroke. We conceptualized in 1998 a shape memory polymer foam, open-celled foam, that could be compressed, expand by 100x volume and be placed in that aneurysm, triggered to expand, and it would create a network

    00:01:22 of microclots that would far more effectively fill and embolize the aneurysm. The acute measure of a treated aneurysm is if that aneurysm gets filled with a blood clot, and current devices put in about 20-to-30 percent of the volume with metal. These are metal wires, coils is what they’re called. And our device puts in this single foam that expands, clots the entire aneurysm and that blood clot is far more, for our device the blood clot is supported in all dimensions throughout the entire volume of the aneurysm with the shape memory polymer foam. Shape memory polymer foams are superior because they clot better acutely, they rapidly endotheolize and close off that neck of the aneurysm from flow and where the metal coils have 40 percent reoccurrence of recantellization, or the aneurysm reforming, our foams encourage very healthy response from the tissue, and you get live, vibrant

    00:02:35 cells throughout the healed aneurysm. We’ve shown that we get equivalent or better responses both acutely and more importantly chronically in the treatment of aneurysms. And so we’ve proved out that the shape memory polymer foams can be delivered through all the logistics of, they can be delivered, they work, the clinicians are kind of happy with the design, how they feel relative to current devices all these kinds of things. But the baseline technology is going to open up applications all over the body both in the vasculature and out. We have applications in the cardiovasculature and the peripheral vasculature, treating other types of aneurysms, treating types of aneurysms that nobody can treat right now. I think this is the technology platform that can lead to much better treatment. In many cases you want to, actually, any case where you want to block flow, there’s cancers, there’s malformations

    00:03:41 of arteries and veins that you want to block up, these foams have lots of applications in those directions.