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Burlington-based medical device startup Rhythmia Medical Inc. has just won a government grant for $200,000 to help better treat irregular heartbeats, or arrhythmia.
Rhythmia has received a Phase 1 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institutes of Health. The money will go toward the development of Rhythmia’s system, which is meant to enable doctors to see the heart’s activities during catheter ablation procedures. During ablation, doctors remove the damaged tissue that distorts the brain’s signals to the heart, causing it to beat irregularly.
Using proprietary technology, Rhythmia is crafting a catheter equipped with electronic sensors in the tip, explained Leon Amariglio, company co-CEO and co-founder along with Doron Harlev. Doctors insert the catheter into a patient’s groin, and from there, into the heart. The sensors in the tip feed data back to a workstation attached to the catheter located next to the patient. In this workstation, a software program runs algorithms on the signals to generate a heart map. “The image presented by our workstation is an actual three-dimensional image of the heart overlaid with 3-D information about the electrical activity,” said Amariglio. This allows doctors to optimize the ablation treatment, he said.
Currently, there is no technology that enables seeing all the heart’s electrical activity during ablation, said Stephen Sagon, president and CEO of Marlborough-based CardioFocus Inc., which makes ablation devices. Typically, the only way to detect heart electrical activity is to apply external devices, which offer limited visibility.
Rhythmia has raised $9 million in angel and other rounds, said Amariglio. Rhythmia will apply the SBIR cash toward developing subsystems for the device and to pay for some advanced research. The market for catheter ablation technology overall is worth about $1.5 billion annually, he estimated.
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