An excerpt from Emory Magazine’s feature on Emory/GT collaborative research:
“If cardiac surgery can be performed on a beating heart through a small incision, it reduces bleeding, risk of infection, and the stress of stopping and restarting the heart. The start-up Apica Cardiovascular has licensed a Georgia Tech/Emory technology invented by researchers Ajit Yoganathan, Jorge Jimenez, Thomas Vassiliades, and Vinod Thourani to simplify and standardize this technique. With support from the Coulter Foundation Translational Research Program and the Georgia Research Alliance VentureLab program, the company has completed preclinical studies. “By minimizing the incision size to gain access to the beating heart and eliminating the need for conventional sutures, our system improves safety, decreases procedure time, and reduces some technical challenges,” says Thourani, associate professor of surgery and codirector of the Structural Heart Center in Emory’s Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery. The company was named Emory University’s Start-up Company of 2010.”