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A mouse sits on the readout device of the ADVantage™ system.
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SAN ANTONIO (Nov. 12, 2008) — One of the most reliable early signs of congestive heart failure (CHF) is increased blood volume in the left ventricle of the heart.

Marc D. Feldman, M.D., and colleagues from the Janey and Dolph Briscoe Division of Cardiology at the UT Health Science Center worked with electrical engineers from UT Austin to develop a device that measures blood volume in animal models, accurately predicting CHF.

Their device, the ADVantage™ (short for Admittance-Derived Pressure Volume System) may someday help doctors predict CHF in humans, giving doctors precious time to increase medications to avert heart attacks.

CHF is the most common cause of hospital admissions in the country.

ADVantage is a catheter system that establishes an electrical field in blood and muscle. It measures voltage to evaluate both pressure and volume from the major pumping chamber of the heart, the left ventricle. The device is able to distinguish between the voltage signals derived from the heart walls and those that truly indicate the blood volume.

The early warning device is under testing in mice and other animals bred with genetic defects that result in cardiac weakness and CHF. During the process, the team overcame the challenges of measuring CHF in the mouse heart, which is the size of a pencil eraser and beats 700 times a minute, 10 times faster than a healthy human heart.

Inexpensive device could have significant impact in cardiology
“The invention has gone through peer review for the past several years, and experts in the field have stated that the device will have significant impact, because right now only two techniques (MRI and 3D echo) in only a handful of centers can give a correct assessment of performance of the ventricles, regardless of chamber structure,” Dr. Feldman said.

MRI and 3D echo are expensive and cannot be coupled with pressure readings. Electrical signals can be coupled with pressure measurements, are inexpensive and provide insight into what is happening in the mouse heart. “In an animal with heart failure that is treated with a novel medication, we can arrive at a measurement that tells us whether the heart is weaker or stronger. The measurement is more precise than older methods,” Dr. Feldman said.

The Health Science Center will be a training center for those who buy the system.

Marc D. Feldman received his M.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, in 1981.

Early indicator to boost medications, avert failure
Several leading cardiology research groups are implanting heart failure pressure systems in CHF patients to provide early warning before patients go into heart failure. “In this way the doctor can increase medications and keep patients out of the hospital,” Dr. Feldman said. “The ADVantage system will be the most sensitive of these systems, provided we can move it from animal studies into humans and obtain U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for this purpose.”

MRI systems and 3D echo machines cost from $250,000 to more than $1 million. ADVantage™ will cost $10,000 to $20,000 (10 percent of a 3D echo machine and 1 percent of an MRI system), making it available to scientific laboratories throughout the world, Dr. Feldman said.

New company established to market the technology
The UT Health Science Center and UT Austin have taken an equity interest in the San Antonio-based company called Conductance Technologies Inc., which has licensed the relevant patents to a London, Ontario, company, Scisense, in exchange for allowing Scisense to develop the relevant patents related to the device’s use in animals.

Royalties are being returned to the labs of the inventors, who include Dr. Feldman and John A. Pearce, Ph.D., as well as Jonathan Valvano, Ph.D., from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UT Austin. “The three of us have been working on this for 10 years to perfect the system, validate the technology and get it commercialized,” Dr. Feldman said. “This is an example of collaboration between campuses, with royalties coming back to labs to fund more research and the universities retaining equity.”

Dr. Feldman noted that credit goes to Danny Escobedo, John Erikson, Rudulfo Trevino, Travis Jenkins and Bysani Chandrashekar, all from the UT Health Science Center, as well as John Porterfield, Erik Larson, and Karthik Raghavan, who are graduate students at UT Austin.

The inventors hold five U.S. patents on the device, three of which were licensed to Scisense. The company hired Anil Kottam, Ph.D., former doctoral student in biomedical engineering at UT Austin, to assist with transferring the technology for commercialization.

Human studies planned
Although the license agreement with Scisense is for studying cardiac function in animals only, Dr. Feldman expects to move to human studies in the near future.

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The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio is the leading research institution in South Texas and one of the major health sciences universities in the world. With an operating budget of $668 million, the Health Science Center is the chief catalyst for the $16.3 billion biosciences and health care sector in San Antonio’s economy. The Health Science Center has had an estimated $36 billion impact on the region since inception and has expanded to six campuses in San Antonio, Laredo, Harlingen and Edinburg. More than 24,000 graduates (physicians, dentists, nurses, scientists and other health professionals) serve in their fields, including many in Texas. Health Science Center faculty are international leaders in cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, aging, stroke prevention, kidney disease, orthopaedics, research imaging, transplant surgery, psychiatry and clinical neurosciences, pain management, genetics, nursing, dentistry and many other fields. For more information, visit www.uthscsa.edu.