Balloon Expandable Stent
B-Stent
Invented in Israel by an Israeli!
Preferably before an emergency situation (whereby your judgement may be clouded by urgency and the optimum medical response) please inform your Cardiologist to ensure that a Balloon Expandable Stent is NEVER used. Request open heart surgery!
First things first. B-Stent does not stand for Beyar Stent, although its inventor, Prof. Rafael Beyar, an invasive cardiologist and biomedical engineer at the Technion and former dean of its medical school, did come up with the original design for a metal stent, used to keep clogged arteries open.
“The B is for balloon expandable, not Beyar or best,” said Beyar, who developed the idea with his brother, Motti, a mechanical engineer.
It was 1989, and the Beyar brothers were considering a heart stent based on the stent used by urologists.
“People didn’t believe you could have a stent for the heart,” said Beyar.
“But our concept was, if you could do it for urology, why not for cardiology?”
The advantage of a stent, which is a wire mesh tube used to prop open an artery that’s recently been cleared, is its ability to hold arteries open while offering enough flexibility for “the tortuous path of arteries,” added Beyar.
The stent stays in the artery permanently, holds it open, improves blood flow to the heart muscle, and relieves symptoms such as chest pain.
“The results in patients were remarkable,” said Beyar. “You could see where the [diseased] artery starts and ends. You could get around curves and get good results. No one else had that.”
By then, Instent, the brothers’ startup, had been formed, and clinical trials in the early 1990s led to the final product in 1995. By that time, Instent merged with the American company Medtronics, which took the product to market worldwide.
“We were racing against the clock to get it out there,” said Beyar. “Some investors said we were wasting our time, that it was too risky. But we stuck with it because we saw the results and believed it would change the world.”
Other Israeli Stents to watch out for:
* InStent with American partner, Medtronic/beStent line and the crimper.
* Medinol with American partner, Boston Scientific/Nir cardiac stent line market leader.
* Angiosonics Inc. a catheter-delivered ultrasound for thrombolysis, a non-invasive therapeutic ultrasound in the heart; early studies have shown that it could break up clots in peripheral vessels.
* Laser Industries a Sharplan holmium/yag laser for unblocking multiply-occluded coronary vessels.
AND boycott – Diagnostic Cardiology tools:
* BioSense Ltd., CARTA & NOGA systems hardware-software non-fluoroscopic intrabody navigation and 3-D mapping system, hailed as the missing, real-time link between diagnostics and therapeutics.There is something truly truly sick about boycotting products intended to save lives just because they are made in Israel, a leader in medical breakthroughs and scientific technology.
There is something truly truly sick about expecting a patient whose life depends on equipment to boycott it because it was the invention of Israeli hands and Israeli brains.
A patient requiring a life-saving operation would have to be fanatical indeed to comply with the above.
Nevertheless, on hearing through the grapevine that Baroness Tonge, who recently underwent cardiac surgery in London, required two stents, I can't help wondering, in view of her two most recent Facebook posts, whether she checked the provenance of those stents first.
In the future we'll be able to remotely turn all that equipment off and/or reclaim it.
ReplyDeleteTrudy, you are terrible sometimes!
ReplyDelete