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THE NEW PARADIGM FOR HEART FAILURE THERAPY

ELIVE Medical is developing a low power ELIVE™ CO₂ Laser System that will now enable interventional cardiologists to perform Endogenous Laser Induced Ventricular Enhancement (ELIVE™) therapy on a significant percentage of patients diagnosed with heart failure.

ELIVE™ therapy will be used to treat the hibernating myocardium and surrounding affected tissue. This focused application of CO₂ laser energy to these myocardial segments (determined by pre-procedure MRI or echo scan) of the left ventricle (the hibernating myocardium) creates reaction zones that act to stimulate angiogenic processes and initiate a re-remodeling of the connecting tissue matrix within the myocardium.

Based on the work of Prof. Klein and others, it is now known that ELIVE™ therapy initiates endogenous repair mechanisms to effectively reverse the progressing impairment of cardiac function in patients suffering from ischemic cardiomyopathy (ICM), as well as initiating a re-remodeling of the connecting tissue matrix that reverses the dilatation process associated with heart failure diagnosis in patients suffering from dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), and results in significantly upgraded cardiac output and improved quality of life for both patient groups.

TEAM

Professor Hans-Michael Klein

Professor Hans-Michael Klein, Founder, Chief Medical Officer, is a renowned, widely published German cardiac surgeon who has performed thousands of surgical procedures and who has traveled and lectured extensively on five continents.  Dr. Klein is an acknowledged leader in the international cardiac surgery community based on his 30+ years of clinical research and surgical experience.

Professor Klein has experimented with several laser modalities to determine which performs the best in this therapy and on what basis. His experiments and clinical research and experience have shown that the unique physical characteristics of CO₂ laser energy when applied to hibernating myocardial tissue provide the most substantial improvements in cardiac function because of the re-remodeling and angiogenic processes that are initiated by the interaction of CO₂ energy with the indicated myocardial tissue.

Michael Heke, Ph.D.

Dr. Michael Heke, co-Founder, Chief Scientific Officer and Acting Chief Executive Officer, started his career in the pharma industry (Bayer AG), with pharmaceutical research in the fields of cardiovascular disease and liver fibrosis. He then pursued an academic career (i.a. EMBL, The Rockefeller University) in which he focused on stem cell research and its potential for clinical application. He headed the cardiovascular research institute at Düsseldorf University Medical School where he co-initiated the INSTEM clinical trial jointly with Professor Klein, successfully treating heart failure by means of a novel, laser-induced stem cell therapy. He later led the Department of Knowledge Management at University of Cologne, coordinated the large-scale collaborative EU-Projects ESNATS and DETECTIVE, and was appointed Scientific Advisory Board Member of the SEURAT-1 cluster. He was Secretary to the German Society for Stem Cell Research, and co-initiated the German Stem Cell Network.

Following his tenure as Deputy Head of the Department of Stem Cell Biology & Molecular Embryology at The Rockefeller University, New York, Dr. Heke is currently appointed as a Senior Scientist at Stanford University, Palo Alto CA, holding a position as Special Assistant to the President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, and acts as Deputy Head of Laboratory on behalf of the President.

Michael Flahive, M.A.

Mr. Flahive is the Managing Director Ireland for ELIVE Medical Ltd. He worked in the Private and Investment Banking business in Chicago, Illinois, with Brown Brothers Harriman and Company (portfolio management) and Laird Inc. (Vice President Institutional Services) during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1975, he returned to Ireland to embark on a programme of study in science and medicine. He has since published journals in Health Informatics for primary care in the UK and the European Commission’s Health Telematics Observatory. He has acted in a Consultancy capacity in Venture Capital, International Finance and Government affairs. He has been Director of the Centre for Health Informatics at Trinity College Dublin and has developed the Electronic Health Record system for the National Haemophilia Centre at St James’s Hospital Dublin.

In his capacity as Managing Director Ireland, Mr. Flahive orchestrates the business development of ELIVE Medical Ltd. in Ireland, and acts as the right hand to the CEO for the company’s overall operations.

Joe Callaghan, Ph.D.

Dr. Callaghan, Manager Technical Development, has almost 20 years of industrial experience in technology companies with a diverse range of expertise from R&D management, advanced manufacturing, and process development to software development, ASIC design and verification, mathematical modelling, image processing, DSP and bio-photonics.

Based on his diverse background encompassing time working as a Software Engineer, Electronics Engineer and Laser Engineer as well as a R&D manager, Dr. Callaghan is taking the lead on aspects of technical development to specify, design and build the EliveMed Heart Laser system.