Heart Implant Therapi to deliver medication where required

A new heart implant, known as Therapi has been developed by an Irish –American research consortium to deliver medication exactly when it’s required.
The implant features a polymer reservoir made from gelatin where the drugs can be stored and released to the damaged tissue as and when needed. With the implants flat bottom, the semi permeable membrane can be adjusted to allow more drugs to pass directly to the heart tissue, reducing the need multiple invasive surgeries.
The research, led by Harvard University and featured input from MIT, Ireland’s Royal College of Surgeons, Trinity College Dublin, Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research (AMBER) Centre, and National University of Ireland Galway, discovered that those who received multiple doses of therapy through the device following a heart attack showed improved cardiac function, compared to those that were treated with a single dose or not at all.
“After a heart attack we could use this device to deliver therapy to prevent a patient from getting heart failure,” explained Ellen Roche, co-first author of the study and assistant professor at MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science. “If the patient already has some degree of heart failure, we can use the device to attenuate the progression.”