Avenns Medical

Regeneration of infarcted heart muscle remained a dream of modern medicine despite of comprehensive research on stem cell and gene therapy. Both technologies have not gained broad clinical use due to limited clinical results and significant side-effects including tumour formation. Shockwaves at low-energy levels are in broad clinical use for tissue regeneration in various indications, mainly in orthopaedics (see International Society of Medical Shockwave Treatment: www.ismst.com). It is therefore proven safe in millions of patients over more than 30 years. This distinguishes shockwave therapy clearly from all other regenerative therapy approaches! Our system is the first shockwave device for direct cardiac application during Coronary Artery Bypass Graft surgery (CABG) in the world. It induces tissue regeneration in infarcted heart muscle and thereby significantly improves heart function, i.e. left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF). One key finding of our CAST-HF trial is the fact that direct cardiac shockwave therapy resulted in a significant improvement of LVEF at 12 months after the intervention. This results in an improvement of the patients’ physical capacity, increased quality of life and a prolonged life expectancy. While establishing cardiac shockwave therapy for the intraoperative use in cardiac surgery, we are in parallel developing a second-generation heart applicator for minimally invasive / interventional use in cardiology.