Preeclampsia is one of the most common serious maladies that pregnant women encounter. It is a poorly understood condition with symptoms such as high blood pressure, proteinuria, and headaches, potentially even leading to seizures.
The treatment options for preeclampsia are still very limited, mostly confined to hypertension medications, bed rest, and birthing the baby, which is essentially a cure for the disease.
A new option from Advanced Prenatal Therapeutics, a Laguna Hills, California company, has just been given Breakthrough Device Designation by the FDA for its Targeted Apheresis Column for Preeclampsia (TAC-PE), a device that cleans whole blood of offensive contents.
Similar to receiving conventional blood dialysis, the patient’s blood is moved through an apheresis machine that separates it into blood cells and plasma. The plasma goes through the TAC-PE device that removes sFlt-1, an antiangiogenic protein that messes with the VEGF factor responsible for building healthy blood vessels. The clean plasma is recombined with the patient’s blood cells and returned back to her.
Product page: Targeted Apheresis Column for Preeclampsia (TAC-PE)…