Interventional Work Research

The IWR (Interventional Work Research) group at Klinik Hirslanden, working as an associate CABMM partner through MSRU, is generally interested in understanding disease and minimally invasive treatment options using medical devices and implants in the field of clinical neurosciences. The work is currently focused on neurovascular wall pathologies and mainly in aneurysm disease. The increasingly successful clinical use of medical devices to correct for such vessel wall pathologies involves methods of flow correction by "flow diverters or flow modulators", i.e. stent-like endoprothesis with dense mesh structures. IWR tries to use and develop methodologies to study and understand the impact such endovascular flow correction methods and the changes induced at a biological level in the concerned vessel wall. Therefore, we have introduced the "rabbit elastase aneurysm model" through external collaboration with Univ. of Essen (I. Wanke) and CABMM internal collaboration at MRSU (B. von Rechenberg, A. Mallik, K. Nuss) and are about to modify the model in order to create variable aneurysm morphology and biological behaviour. We wish to measure, calculate and visualize flow changes in the animal model, we collaborate with the radiology section of the Veterinary school (P. Kircher) and the Computational Physics Group at IT'IS Foundation of Research (D. Sczszerba, E. Neufeld) and at BIWI, ETHZ (G. Szekely, S. Hirsch, J. Egger). Since reverse remodeling of the vessel wall goes through initial thrombosis of the aneurysm cavity and since delayed side effects of flow diverter use is observed to be associate mostly with biological changes associated with thrombus, we have started to develop methods of analysis to study the biology of thrombus formation in the setting of flow diverter use involving a variety of metals and device surface characteristics, this in collaboration with Surgical Research and Clinics of Cardiovascular Surgery, USZ (S. Hoerstrup, A. Mallik). The CABMM setting, thorugh its provision of GLP standards, is very encouraging for our ambitions to support the needs of medical companies for reaching effective regulatory approval. We have entertained industrial collaborations with interest in applied biotechnology to help understand medical device effects and modifications made to improve acute and delayed thrombus formation and associated healing.