ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Though congenital heart defects are a leading cause of childhood fatalities, there are no prosthetic valves for transcatheter use in young children. PolyVascular seeks to change this with a failure-resistant, polymer-based transcatheter valve that could spare patients one or more open surgeries.
Over two million Americans live with congenital heart defects (CHD), and more pediatric patients lose their lives to CHD than all childhood cancers combined, comprising more than 4% of neonatal deaths nationwide, according to the CDC. Though the types of defects vary, about 95% of infants with non-critical CHD are expected to survive to 18 years old, with that number dropping to 69% for those with critical defects.
