10 Up-and-Coming Healthcare Medical Innovations

The Cleveland Clinic recently unveiled their annual Top 10 Medical Innovations for 2015– a list that casts an optimistic light on up-and-coming healthcare advances that may reach consumers next year.

Their number one? Mobile stroke units.

It’s no secret that when it comes to strokes, time is of the essence. The CDC recommends stroke victims receive treatment within 3 hours of the first symptoms, which is why it is key to act F.A.S.T. (Face, Arms, Speech, Time) when you think someone may be having a stroke.

In 1996, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved an emergency drug for ischemic stroke— the most common kind— known as tissue-type plasminogen activator (tPA). Easily delivered through an IV in the arm, tPA effectively breaks up a blood clot that hinders blood flow to the brain. However, even with tPA, time is still of the essence: the drug is best given within an hour of arrival at a hospital, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

This is where mobile stroke units come in. In the United States, only 2 to 7 percent of stroke patients eligible for tPA actually get the treatment--a weak percentage given the potential benefits. If, as Jayme Zage, Ph.D., said in a recent blog, geography is to blame for the lack of stroke victims receiving tPA, then localized mobile stroke units (manned by a neurologist, nurse, CT tech and paramedic) may provide the faster-paced treatment strategy needed to help minimize stroke damage and fatalities.

Currently only two mobile stroke units are active in the United States, one of which is operated by the Cleveland Clinic.

Here are the nine runners-up on the Cleveland Clinic’s Top 10 list:

2. Dengue fever vaccine

More than 50 to 100 million people in more than 100 countries contract the dengue virus each year, according to the Cleveland Clinic’s list. Hopefully, Sanofi Pasteur’s vaccine against the virus will be submitted to international regulatory agencies in 2015. In the company’s most recent Phase 3 trial, the vaccine showed an efficacy of 60.8 percent in children, aged 9 to 16, in Latin America.

Watch more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV-x4DFlL0s&feature=youtu.be

3. Cost-effective, fast, painless blood testing

A new art of blood collection— and the diagnoses that come from blood tests— has arrived. Cleveland Clinic included “fast, painless blood-testing” on their list, a method that uses a drop of blood drawn from the fingertip in a virtually painless procedure. Indeed, Elizabeth Holmes, CEO of Theranos, pioneered such an approach. Wired reported that this technique will usher in “a new generation of diagnostic tests.” All of this begs the question: Are the days of the “needle empire” over? (Michelle Taylor, editor-in-chief of Laboratory Equipment, thinks so.)

Watch more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MaDdR5yFIk&feature=youtu.be

4. Inhibitors for cholesterol reduction

Despite the success of cholesterol-reducing statin medications, some patients cannot benefit from them. For this reason, the Cleveland Clinic’s list looks to an alternative that may come next year— PCSK9 inhibitors. This new class of injectable, cholesterol-lowering drugs can help those patients whose LDL levels are too high to be controlled by statins. Evolocumab, currently in development by Amgen, is one of the most promising. The drug hit key endpoints in several Phase 3 trials, and, as a result, has been submitted to the FDA and the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

Watch more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1ztI7Cw5rg&feature=youtu.be

5. Antibody-drug conjugates

Of course, cancer therapies made the list, too. The Cleveland Clinic chose to highlight antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) because as opposed to chemotherapy— which attacks cancer cells and harms healthy cells— ADCs are targeted, so they attack tumor cells directly. Two ADCs are already on the market (Seattle Genetics’ Hodgkin’s lymphoma drug Adcetris and Genentech’s HER2-positive breast cancer drug Herceptin), and hopefully more are coming in 2015. The list claims “over two dozen” are currently in clinical trials.

Watch more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sqc6l_6pic&feature=youtu.be

6. Checkpoint inhibitors

Also on the list is a cancer treatment that moves away from tumor elimination and instead focuses on the immune system as a whole. Immune checkpoint inhibitors (IV immunomodulators) can cause a disruption in the overall process that allows cancer cells to survive. Merck’s Keytruda was recently approved to treat metastatic melanoma, after receiving a Breakthrough Therapy status from the FDA.

Watch more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UDtCsxyX7Y&feature=youtu.be

7. Leadless cardiac pacemaker

For more than 50 years, the cardiac pacemaker has been an unchanged mainstay in cardiovascular care. The Cleveland Clinic hopes that, in 2015, perhaps pacemakers will get a makeover and lose their sometimes unreliable “lead”— a wire that’s inserted through the vein to keep the heart beating steadily. A wireless pacemaker from St. Jude Medical was approved by the European Union in 2013, so hopefully this technology will have a global presence next year.

Watch more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csUj9Sv-Q8o&feature=youtu.be

8. New drugs for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis

It’s been a blockbuster year for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) research, and 2015 looks to be no different. Bioscience Technology has been following IPF research in both humans and mice, and it looks as if the Cleveland Clinic has, too. The IPF community cheered when two new drugs received fast-tracked approval in October, so these treatments should be making a big impact in 2015.

Watch more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFuXRN4U0yk&feature=youtu.be

9. Single-dose intra-operative radiation therapy for breast cancer

With another big nod to cancer research, the Cleveland Clinic is hoping for improvements to intra-operative radiation therapy (IORT) for breast cancer. IORT benefits women with early-stage breast cancer who would typically undergo a lumpectomy followed by whole-breast radiation. With IORT, these women get high doses of specialized radiation during the lumpectomies. In the five-year TARGIT-A clinical trial, IORT was shown to be just as effective as typical external beam radiation therapy, and as the Cleveland Clinic pointed out, was “significantly less costly” and boosted quality of life for patients.

Watch more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z91GUWiRGdU&feature=youtu.be

10. New drug for heart failure

Angiotensin-receptor neprilysin inhibitors (ARNIs) have arrived to battle ACE (angiotensin-converting enzyme) inhibitors for top heart failure treatment. As the Cleveland Clinic’s list pointed out, experimental treatment with ARNIs has “completely surprised the world of cardiology.” Novartis recently announced that its ARNI, LCZ696, reduced the risk of cardiac death by 20 percent, when compared with ACE inhibitors in a Phase 3 trial. The company will file for global regulatory approvals in early 2015.

Watch more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9odoJLPHmlg&feature=youtu.be