A newly established spinout from Ulster University has developed a novel technology with the potential to greatly improve the quality of life as well as the life expectancy of people suffering from advanced heart failure. Galvani Tech is the result of a 10-year research collaboration between consultant cardiologist David McEneaney and a group of bioengineers at Ulster University.
“Ulster University has one of the most active bioengineering departments in Britain and Ireland,” says McEneaney.
The research looked at an unmet need in the area of heart failure. “Heart failure is a devastating disease that affects more than 10 million people in Europe and the US, with an incidence of 1.1 million new cases per year,” he explains. “Furthermore, current growth rates predict a 25 per cent increase in the incidence of heart failure by 2030. The mortality rate is higher than for most cancers. There are good treatments available but with advanced heart failure, the patient needs a heart transplant. About 150,000 patients in each region are candidates for heart transplants, yet only around 5,000 heart transplants are performed worldwide each year due to lack of donor availability.”
For those patients who can’t get a heart transplant, one treatment option is a Left Ventricular Assist Device (LVAD). These are small electromechanical pumps used in advanced heart failure patients while waiting for a transplant, improving cardiac output and patient survival. Due to a lack of donors, LVADs are increasingly used as a final therapy or destination therapy.
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While the quality of LVADs has improved quite dramatically over the past 20 years, there are still some considerable drawbacks. Chief among them is power consumption. It takes 20 watts to run the device, small by household standards but massive for a medical device — one million times the amount required by a pacemaker.
That means they have to be powered by external batteries connected by a wire through the patient’s skin. “This driveline wire is the Achilles heel,” says McEneaney. “It can get infected causing all sorts of problems like sepsis.”
This can have an impact on treatment outcomes. Heart transplant patients have a 90 per cent chance of living five years; when an LVAD is used as destination therapy, patients only have a 65 per cent chance of living five years due to driveline complications, mainly infections.
One solution would be to use an internal battery requiring regular recharging. “People ask why you can’t charge an internal battery wirelessly like a mobile phone,” McEneaney notes. “The power required to wirelessly charge an implantable rechargeable battery suitable for LVADs through a patient’s skin would be many times greater than that used by wireless mobile phone chargers. This would quickly cause skin and tissue damage. We have developed a solution that offers a way to wirelessly charge the internal battery without damaging the skin.”
The Galvani Tech solution is a novel thin and flexible coil design, allowing cooling using tissue blood flow around the coil. Additionally, a proprietary pulsatile charging protocol has been shown to minimise tissue heating.
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The next step is to deploy it. “We are reaching out to medtech companies involved in this area to collaborate with them. We are looking at artificial hearts as well. A number of companies are developing artificial hearts which will require wireless charging. There is a good ecosystem there of companies involved in the development of LVADs and artificial hearts.”
Research to date has been funded from a variety of sources. InvestNI provided proof of concept funding of £150,000. Heart Research UK provided a grant of £250,000 three years ago and that was topped up from other sources to bring the total to about £500,000.
“There is no point in doing this if you don’t commercialise it and bring it to market. [The] best way to do it is to start up a spinout company from Ulster University so we have set up Galvani Tech.”
McEneaney and his co-founders Prof Omar Escalona, and Mohammad Karim have already received a £300,000 grant from UK Research and Innovation and £100,000 in funding in the form of a convertible loan note from Innovation Ulster, the start-up funding wing of Ulster University. That will fund the employment of two engineers who will work alongside the founders’ team who have also been joined by LVAD industry veteran Stuart McConchie as chief executive.
“We have a number of technical and engineering milestones to meet over the coming year and we will continue to create further intellectual property assets. We will also seek further funding rounds over the next few years as the company expands. The wireless charging market for high-power medical implants is estimated to be in the region of $15 billion. Our goal is to eliminate the driveline for LVADs and be the platform technology for all future high-power medical implants including things like artificial livers and kidneys which are only being thought about at the moment.”