Mercator MedSystems (San Leandro, CA) received European regulator approval to bring to market its Bullfrog and Cricket micro-infusion catheters. Already approved for use in the U.S., the catheters were designed to deliver medications through blood vessel walls directly to tissue deep inside the body. This technique keeps the injected agent at high concentration near the target and helps it from spreading into the rest of the body.
The company is envisioning the catheters to be used for “plaque stabilization in diseased vessels, anti-tumor drugs, growth factors to stimulate cell division, and stem cell transplantation and gene therapies.” Initially it plans to promote its use in treating peripheral artery disease (PAD).
More from the announcement:
The Mercator micro-infusion catheters are capable of non-systemic delivery of therapeutic agents directly across any peripheral or coronary blood vessel. Initially, these products will be commercialized for the treatment of peripheral artery disease (PAD), a critical health issue affecting 12-14 percent of the general population and nearly 20% of those over the age of 70. Approximately 23 million Western Europeans and 17 million Americans have PAD.
The Cricket and Bullfrog micro-infusion catheters establish a revolutionary platform that, for the first time, allows clinicians to accurately pinpoint the delivery of drugs and biologics deep into the body to treat the root cause of disease. Mercator’s patented, proprietary catheters can be guided to therapeutic targets, where a balloon, inflated with low pressure to prevent damage to the vessel wall, self-adjusts to the diameter of the vessel. It then deploys a micro-needle into the outer active tissue layer of the vessel wall, or adventitia – where the drugs are diffused to bathe the entire vessel cylindrically, from the outside to the inside, creating a unique, tissue-based, drug-eluting reservoir.
The adventitia as a novel therapeutic target has been well described in the scientific literature. In 2007, Kathryn Maiellaro-Rafferty, PhD. and W. Robert Taylor, M.D., PhD. from Emory University focused on the “outside-in” mechanism in the journal, Cardiovascular Research. Referencing cardiovascular disease pathologies, they noted, “Considering the outside-in hypothesis, we see that…the inflammatory events appear to initiate in the adventitia.” In reference to his ongoing PAD clinical research, Christopher Owens, MD, MSc, Associate Professor of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco said, “The Bullfrog catheter has demonstrated its ability to efficiently deliver potent therapeutic agents outside the blood vessel, specifically to the adventitia. I believe we are now seeing the promise of adventitial delivery: a biologic effect of the drug interrupting the inflammatory cascade that normally leads to restenosis after a vascular intervention.”
Product page: Cricket and Bullfrog Micro-Infusion Catheters…
Press release: Mercator MedSystems Announces European Market Clearance for its Groundbreaking Adventitial Drug Delivery Catheters