Cerenovus President Mark Dickinson on the future of stroke care

Cerenovus President Mark Dickinson forecasts the innovative technologies that will advance stroke care in the coming years.

It’s getting harder to beat aspiration systems for fast and simple thrombectomies to remove blood clots that are blocking oxygen from a stroke patient’s brain.

That’s according to Cerenovus Worldwide President Mark Dickinson, who discussed the future of stroke care in an interview with Medical Design & Outsourcing.

“It’s a very simple concept that the larger the tube you can get to face the blood clot, the more likely you’re going to be able to evacuate that clot just through suction,” he said. “And advances in technology have enabled us — and, candidly, others in the marketplace — to be able to design these larger bore, larger sized devices to get to destinations that they would never have been able to get to before.”

While there will still be stubborn clots that call for stent retrievers, aspiration is a simpler technique that requires less skill, which could help expand access to stroke treatment in the U.S. and abroad. Great engineering is only partially responsible for getting thrombectomy treatment as far as it’s advanced, he said.

“It’s mostly through highly skilled physicians being able to treat these patients,” he said. “But there are just so many people out there who are having a stroke. … By 2050, almost 10 million people a year are going to die from a stroke, so we really need technologies and methodologies that the masses can use and not just be reliant upon the skills of the 100 top doctors around the world.”

Cerenovus — a unit of Johnson & Johnson MedTech, the world’s second-largest device manufacturer — recently launched the Cereglide 71 catheter for direct aspiration as well as delivery of the Cerenovus Embotrap clot retriever. This next-generation aspiration catheter is the first product that Cerenovus has developed through the efforts of its Neuro Thromboembolic Initiative (NTI) scientific research arm.

“Anybody can make a device and make it track well in one of these simple anatomical models that we traditionally would test these devices on, and then you take that device to the real world and it doesn’t perform to the level that either we would hope for or our customers are expecting,” Dickinson said. “[We] put these products through the most physical tests we possibly can so when we take them to a patient, we’ve got high confidence that we’re going to be successful. … The anatomy is so complicated. It’s so varied. And it can be challenging from one patient to the next.”

Read more at Medical Tubing & Extrusion sister publication Medical Design & Outsourcing.