About CardioMend

CardioMend was founded in 1995 by Jack W. Love, M.D., D.Phil., a cardiac surgeon and biomedical researcher. The company is based in Santa Barbara, California.

CardioMend’s heart valve technology is designed to avoid the problems associated with current replacement heart valves, whether mechanical, animal tissue, or human cadaver tissue. Mechanical valves, while durable, require patients to be on lifelong daily anti-coagulation (blood thinning) medication to reduce the risk of blood clotting that might otherwise occur. Animal and cadaver tissue valves usually reduce or eliminate the need for patients to take anti-coagulation medication, but their durability is limited, often because of calcific degeneration or calcium build-up on the foreign tissue leaflets. An immune response to the foreign tissue has been implicated in the limited durability of commercially available tissue valves, which are unsuitable for use in younger patient cohorts, including infants and children.

For these reasons, surgeons have begun to favor repair and reconstruction of mitral valves when that option is available. Mitral valve repair can include extension of a valve leaflet with the use of autologous (the patient’s own) pericardial tissue, which has been shown to avoid immunogenic response that could lead to calcific degeneration. But surgeons have not had products or a procedure that would allow them to consistently reconstruct aortic valves using autologous pericardium. Though the concept of reconstructing aortic valves with autologous tissue is not new, it has only been practiced successfully by a few pioneering surgeons using their own freehand techniques.

For the last several years, CardioMend has been dedicated to developing technology that would allow simple, consistent, and reproducible semilunar (aortic and pulmonary) valve reconstruction using autologous pericardium without the need for an implantable device. CardioMend will continue its product development efforts by applying the same reconstruction principles to the atrioventricular (mitral and tricuspid) valves.

If you would like more information about CardioMend please contact us by email at info@cardiomend.com.