Flux Medical NV

Article preview from Start-Up - March, 2013

Traditional ablation for treating atrial fibrillation involves disconnecting the electrical pathway that causes the abnormal rhythm, and the procedure can take anywhere from two to four hours, thus limiting the number of cases a cath lab can handle each day. The self-expanding pulmonary vein implant in development at Flux Medical NV is easy to insert inside the vein and should make the procedure much shorter, allowing a cath lab to schedule up to six to eight cases a day.

Flux Medical NV

Article preview from Start-Up - March, 2013

It was in between two cardiac procedures at Middelheim Hospital in Antwerp, Belgium, in early 2011, that an interventional cardiologist and an electrophysiologist, Glenn Van Langenhove and Bruno Schwagten, respectively, first swapped ideas on how to improve the efficacy of using radiofrequency (RF) energy to ablate tissue for treating atrial fibrillation (AF). This is a disease in which the atrium – the upper chamber of each half of the heart – does not pulsate normally but instead fibrillates. “With AF, the atrium becomes a chaotic electrical system and begins to contract about 300 to 600 times per minute,” explains Van Langenhove. “This causes the atrium to form clots; then when these clots are released from the atrium they can cause stroke.”

Van Langenhove and Schwagten were very interested in treating AF faster and more accurately. The idea emerged to combine the best of both worlds: interventional cardiology and electrophysiology. Schwagten was contemplating placing a ring inside each pulmonary vein to perform a continuous ablation, whereas Van Langenhove shared his awareness of self-expanding implants. “What if we placed one of these devices inside each pulmonary vein and then heated the metal devices from the outside?” Van Langenhove asked his colleague. Hence was born the foundation of Belgium-based Flux Medical NV, co-founded by Van Langenhove and Schwagten. “Of course, safety was paramount in the development of the accompanying magnetic field generator, so that the amount of energy delivered would not excessively heat up the implants during follow-up ablation,” Van Langenhove explains.

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