AblaCor Allowed Five Ablation Catheter-Anchoring Patents

AblaCor Medical Corporation has received a notice of allowance from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) on five additional patents for its CircumBlator AFib Catheter Ablation System to advance pulmonary vein isolation (PVI) ablation procedures for patients with atrial fibrillation (AFib)—the most common irregular heart rhythm and a potentially deadly disorder.
 
When issued, AblaCor will have a total of nine patents issued for its CircumBlator system, with several more pending. Although AblaCor’s technology is designed to address AFib, the patent portfolio also has been developed to include additional medical procedures.
 
“AFib is a major international epidemic,” said Martin Sklar, CEO of AblaCor. ”CircumBlator is designed to overcome the drawbacks of other ablation technologies due to their unpredictability in producing durable, continuous, transmural lesions. In fact, recurrence of AFib after treatment with currently available technologies is reported in the scientific literature to be approximately 30 percent.”

AblaCor also announced that it has established a Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) with the appointment of prominent electrophysiologist Lawrence Rosenthal, M.D., Ph.D., FACC, FHRS, who is director of Electrophysiology Service and professor of Medicine, UMass Memorial Medical Center. “Ablacor’s novel approach of a circular ablator, with its controlled electrode-tissue contact, designed to generate continuous and transmural ablation lesions reliably, holds great promise and would be a major advance.”
 
CircumBlator is designed to reduce or eliminate the 30 percent failure rate of existing pulmonary vein isolation (PVI) procedures for treatment of stroke-causing and life-debilitating atrial fibrillation (AFib), an industry currently generating $1.2 billion in medical device sales treating 300,000 patients annually.
 
CircumBlator’s anchoring technology is designed to ensure that the ablation device is secured against the atrial wall during the entire ablation procedure, thus overcoming a key issue associated with the 30 percent failure rate of currently marketed products.
 
Catheter ablation devices are used in a procedure known as pulmonary vein isolation (PVI), which is the cornerstone treatment performed for most AFib patients having an ablation. The purpose of PVI is to create a quality lesion of destroyed tissue encircling the pulmonary veins (PVs) at their entrance into the right atrium (top chamber of the heart). Quality, complete lesions prevent electrical signals originating in the PVs from entering the atria. A quality lesion for PVI is defined by creation of a full-wall depth (4 mm in normal hearts) and continuous lesion ring around each PV and/or encirclement of all the PVs. It is the current consensus of electrophysiologists and cardiologists that a quality lesion performed during PVI can be curative for early-stage or paroxysmal AFib patients.
 
AblaCor is an early-stage medical device company headquartered near Boston, Mass. Its initial product is the CircumBlator AF Catheter Ablation System to advance the standard pulmonary vein isolation (PVI) procedure for patients with atrial fibrillation (AFib), the most common irregular heart rhythm and a potentially deadly disorder. CircumBlator is designed to overcome the limitations of currently available ablation catheters for treating AFib by producing durable, continuous, transmural lesions. AblaCor has a strong portfolio of patents issued and pending.