Is Therapeutic Hypothermia Finally Heating Up?

Article preview from Start-Up - April  01, 2011

Therapeutic hypothermia companies have largely been disappointing for investors who poured in -- and lost -- fortunes investing in promising cooling technologies. But while many first-generation start-ups no longer exist, the technologies they developed live on within the large corporations that paid pennies on the dollars to acquire them. Although the pioneers in the field failed to meet their objectives, there is reason for hope.

Is Therapeutic Hypothermia Finally Heating Up?

Article preview from Start-Up - April  01, 2011

Yet the area is short of success stories. Companies that set out to realize the field's promise back in the late 1990s – Alsius Medical Corp., Radiant Medical Inc. (both now part of Zoll Medical Inc.), and InnerCool Therapies Inc. (now part of Royal Philips Electronics NV) – are gone, although their technologies still fight to survive. Medivance Inc., another company of that era, survives but fights to establish its surface cooling system as a legitimate therapy in applications that go beyond fever control. It has been a long, long journey, during which, at least in some respects, the scenery has changed very little. The promised device markets, in sudden cardiac arrest, acute myocardial infarction, stroke, and traumatic brain injury still loom tantalizingly ahead, just out of reach.

The early companies in the field raised – and spent – millions of dollars trying to validate hypothermia in the most attractive clinical applications. Radiant Medical, the developer of an intravascular cooling catheter, sponsored COOL-MI, enrolling 421 patients in a study that would measure differences in infarct sizes between a group of heart attack patients treated with a hypothermia protocol and a control. Radiant's Reprieve system was an intravascular cooling system. Its catheter was placed in the inferior vena cava and circulated cooled saline to cool the blood passing over it to reduce body temperature. InnerCool's myocardial infarction trial, called ICE-IT enrolled 228 patients to test its catheter-based hypothermia device, the Celsius Control System.

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