In an ongoing effort to develop a more durable and biocompatible heart valve prosthesis, researchers have used a variety of techniques to evaluate a variety of valve materials. However, the ideal materials do not exist, and hemocompatibility problems persist.
With the promising advances of our bioactive coating approach, the coated prosthetic heart valves could replace previous generation of prosthetic valves in the near future.
Due to thrombotic reactions that occur when blood comes in contact with foreign prosthetic materials, patients with mechanical heart valves require lifelong anticoagulant treatment, which makes them at risk of thromboembolic and bleeding events.
Our project provides the first evidence that the clinical performance of mechanical heart valve prosthesis can be improved by using a bioactive coating. This innovative coating technology prevents prosthesis-associated thrombosis. Furthermore, we remarkably found that this coating can also protect from prosthesis bacterial infection, thereby potentially reducing the risk of infective endocarditis.
To date, bioactive coating for mechanical heart valve do not exist.
Although several coatings have been developed for the prevention of either thrombosis or infection of other blood-contacting devices, such as catheters, none of them combine our coating characteristics.
Our bioactive coating shows unique features, which makes it novel and highly valuable.
It is universal, i.e. it can be attached on any materials, e.g. plastics, metals, biological tissues
It is modular, i.e. it could be applied to various medical devices or biomaterials by simply adapting the numbers of layers, and by loading or grafting appropriate drugs or bioactive molecules.
