Shockwave Medical Announces Positive Late Breaking Results of Study of Novel Lithoplasty System for the Treatment of Peripheral Artery Disease

Data Presented at VIVA and TCT 2014 Demonstrate Safety and Effectiveness

Fremont, Calif. and Las Vegas, Nev. – Shockwave Medical, a pioneer in the treatment of peripheral and coronary vascular disease, today announced positive clinical results from DISRUPT PAD, a single-arm multicenter study evaluating the safety and utility of Lithoplasty™ balloon catheters for the treatment of peripheral artery disease, at the Vascular Interventional Advances (VIVA) Annual Conference in Las Vegas, Nev.

In advanced vascular disease, atherosclerosis becomes calcified deep inside the vessel walls, limiting blood flow. These deposits are difficult to treat because they limit the effectiveness of current endovascular devices, making today’s interventions challenging and prone to both procedural and long-term failure. Lithoplasty is a novel balloon-based technology that utilizes integrated lithotripsy, a pulsatile mechanical energy commonly used to break up kidney stones, to disrupt both superficial and deep calcium and normalize vessel wall compliance prior to low-pressure balloon dilatation. Lithoplasty is designed to be naturally gentle to soft tissue (non-diseased portions of the vessel) while remaining hard on calcium, the tissue that limits vessel expansion and the effectiveness of current technologies.

Early clinical evaluation from 35 patients with calcified vascular stenosis of the superficial femoral artery (SFA) and popliteal artery demonstrated safe and effective dilatation of calcified stenosis with no acute failures, favorable residual stenosis, and no re-intervention out to 30 days, with no major adverse events. Primary efficacy results demonstrated 100% success, defined as ability to achieve less than 50% residual stenosis using Lithoplasty with or without adjunctive angioplasty. Device success was 87%, defined as ability to achieve less than 50% residual stenosis using Lithoplasty alone. Importantly, an average residual stenosis of 23% (initial 76%), with no difference in the ability to dilate lesions between moderate (36%) and severely (64%) calcified lesions, was noted. Thirty-day patency assessed by duplex ultrasound was 100%.

“Calcified vascular lesions remain a major impediment to modern percutaneous therapy for vascular disease,” said Marianne Brodmann, M.D., of the Medical University of Graz, Austria, principal investigator of the study, who presented the results at the conference. “The results of this trial demonstrate that, unlike current devices that treat only superficial calcium, Shockwave’s Lithoplasty system promises to be effective on all types of calcium, including deep calcium – the type known to limit vessel expansion.”

“We are excited about these excellent results, which suggest that Lithoplasty technology can address a substantial unmet clinical need in a large subset of patients with peripheral artery disease,” said Shockwave Medical CEO and co-founder Daniel Hawkins. “These results build upon the findings from our coronary First-In-Man study presented earlier this fall at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) conference, which demonstrated the promise of Lithoplasty for the treatment of calcified coronary lesions. We look forward to confirming these promising findings in additional future studies, including the European multi-center DISRUPT CAD study planned for next year.”

First-In-Man Results Presented at TCT 2014

Results from the First-In-Man study of five patients with moderate to severe coronary calcification presented in September at the annual TCT conference in Washington, D.C. demonstrated safety, tolerability, deliverability, and effectiveness for Lithoplasty as a pre-treatment of calcified coronary lesions prior to stenting.

“Disruption of calcium within the vessel wall with Lithoplasty enables the use of low balloon pressures to dilate lesions and improve blood flow. This has the potential to minimize barotrauma and soft tissue vascular injury common to traditional balloons and existing endovascular technologies – an exciting breakthrough for patients with difficult-to-treat coronary calcifications, which continues to be a major problem in cardiology today,” said Todd Brinton, M.D., co-founder of Shockwave Medical and Clinical Associate Professor of Interventional Cardiology, Stanford University.

Source: Shockwave Medical