Cape Town - Cheap new plastic heart valves produced by UCT could save millions of Africans who die every year from childhood rheumatic heart disease (RHD).
Launched this week, the UCT-based innovative company Strait Access Technologies (SAT) is breaking new ground in medical technology through its production of plastic valves instead of traditional tissue-based valves. And experts concur that the initiative will make insertion of life-saving heart valves possible even in the poorest hospitals on the continent.
Professor Peter Zilla, head of cardiac surgery at UCT and chief executive of SAT, said while RHD was a preventable disease that could easily be treated with antibiotics, an unacceptable number of people in the developing world, including South Africa, died from it.
The disease is caused by untreated streptococcal throat infection and is characterised by swelling, shortness of breath and joint pain. It can also permanently damage heart valves.
It affects mainly children over five years. In South Africa alone, 24 in 1 000 people have RHD, while worldwide, between 60 million and 70 million live with it. Most die because they either get to clinics or hospitals too late, or because of a shortage of heart centres to perform cardiac surgery.
Three of the country’s seven public heart centres are in the Western Cape, but most RHD patients die early. About 1 400 to 1 600 patients need surgery every year, but only about 350 get it. The rest are sent home to die because of a lack of resources.
Zilla said: “We should be doing four times the number of rheumatic heart disease operations we do. But a lack of State resources means we can only do a fraction of them.”
But the manufacture of cheaper catheter-based heart valves at UCT means the number of heart surgeries should increase in South Africa and other developing countries, giving patients a second lease of life.
Existing heart valves were mainly made from animal tissue and imported, meaning they were unaffordable for most public-sector patients. Those inserted through open-heart surgery cost about R20 000. Catheter-based valves cost about R300 000 in the private sector without hospital and procedure fees.
He said UCT was trying to adapt to the most sophisticated technology, “where you can implant a heart valve without open-heart surgery.
“The idea is to have these procedures simplified so that any medium-sized hospital in Africa can implant this valve.”
Through funding from the Technology Innovation Agency and Bidvest, SAT developed its valves over the past five years, showing that it could be used in large animals.
Researchers at UCT’s Chris Barnard Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, where tests are done using the latest sophisticated technology, were hopeful that the devices used to insert the heart valves would be used on humans as early as 2017 while the heart valves themselves would be ready for human use between 2017 and 2018.
Professor David Williams, visiting professor from Wake Forest University in North Carolina and chairman of SAT, said the uniqueness of the company was that it had developed the valves under one roof – from conception to the final product. - Cape Argus