How fabrics can be used in heart valves, now and in the future, and design considerations during product development.
Heart valve disease affects nearly 5 million Americans, a figure that is expected to double in the next 25 years, according to the Mayo Clinic. The most advanced of these cases, nearly 98,000 in the United States each year, require heart valve surgery.1 Prosthetic heart valves, whether traditional or transcatheter, are designed to restore function to a damaged heart valve and ultimately prevent heart failure. These devices will continue to evolve as research unlocks the exciting potential of implantable materials in heart valves and their ability to allow the body to repair itself.
Heart valve replacement falls into two procedural categories—open surgery (traditional) and transcatheter replacement—the latter segment includes transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) and transcatheter mitral valve replacement (TMVR).
Within both traditional and catheter-based heart valve implants, the fabric structure is a component that serves to enhance the mechanical function of the valve. Textiles help promote tissue ingrowth, prevent paravalvular leakage and enable a low-profile design for confinement, which is a crucial requirement for transcatheter valve replacement (TVR) devices.
Implantable fabrics can be precisely designed to limit motion in a targeted direction, to stretch to a specific length, or to provide flexibility throughout the entire range of motion. In a TVR device, a properly designed fabric will transform to a desired shape profile after passing through a catheter to enable the valve to function properly and facilitate required tissue ingrowth.