Aortic stiffness is a recognized vascular biomarker (ESC position paper, Vlachopoulos et al., Arthero-sclerosis 2015) and measurement of aortic pulse wave velocity (PWV) is the gold standard methodol-ogy to assess large artery stiffening. Elevated aortic PWV has been shown to predict cardiovascular, and in some cases all causes mortality in individuals with end-stage renal failure, hypertension, diabe-tes mellitus, as well as in the general population. However, at present, PWV is little used in everyday practice mainly because PWV measurement is not reimbursed in any of the European states and be-cause devices on the market (ALAM Medical Complior, SphygmoCor, Mobil-O-Graph, PulsePen, BPLab Vasotens, or Arteriograph) are either complicate to use, time consuming to get the measure and relatively expensive, or only provide low-cost estimations of arterial stiffness whose clinical value is questionable.
ALAM Medical, specialized in arterial stiffness and central pressure, has initiated the WASABI project to scale up the clinical use of PWV as a biomarker, notably by investigating alternative sensors in or-der to offer an easier to use and more affordable device measuring gold standard aortic stiffness and local carotid stiffness. By providing a medical device with such characteristics, as well as by under-taking appropriate market awareness actions, we intend to transform our existing niche market, main-ly composed of clinical researchers, into a large-scale market composed of clinical practitioners, car-diologists or physicians: arterial stiffness measurements have the potential to move from research to standard medical practice, on the model of blood pressure measurements.
During project Phase 1, ALAM Medical has investigated several sensor technologies to measure ca-rotid-femoral PWV, the gold standard methodology for arterial stiffness. The evaluation results of the sensors evaluation led ALAM MEDICAL to re-orientate the WASABI project toward another solution to assess arterial stiffness. ALAM Medical performed in-depth market survey, started a R&D collabora-tion project with another company and elaborated a business plan to work with them.
