The American Heart Association reports that 15.8 Million Americans suffer from Coronary Heart Disease (CHD). The problem is to identify these often asymptomatic patients from among the general patient population. Moreover, many patients appear in the emergency room with CHD symptoms such as chest pain that is not associated with coronary artery disease. Currently, doctors are faced with ordering risky, time-consuming and expensive tests to determine if further treatment is required or the patient can be sent home. Only invasive, diagnostic imaging tests including catheterization and angiography can definitively identify those patients requiring immediate clinical intervention (stent placement, angioplasty, coronary artery bypass graft) from those that do not.
During a heart attack, structural components of the heart are released into the blood including troponin, BNP, ANP, etc. which serve as biomarkers of myocardial damage. However, there is a vital and unmet need for a diagnostic assay to identify patients at imminent risk of heart attack or stroke in the vast domain of clinical oversight that exists between common blood tests for cholesterol and lipids versus indicators of heart breakdown such as troponin that are present after a heart attack has taken place.
Many more otherwise healthy individuals arrive in emergency rooms with heart attack like symptoms, only to discover that heartburn, medications, or other causes are to blame. Currently the “Gold Standard” for coronary blockage is a cardiac catheterization. This invasive $7,000 to $10,000 procedure is conducted 1,150,000 times a year. Prevencio addresses this important problem by developing simple diagnostic tools that discriminate those patients who are about to have a heart attack from those who are not.
Stroke is the third leading cause of death in the Western world after heart disease and cancer. Those that survive face severe disabilities, including but not limited to paralysis, psychosis, seizures and loss of cognitive and/or sensory functions. In the U.S., approximately 800,000 patients arrive at emergency rooms every year presenting with stroke or stroke-like symptoms. At the present time there are no tests available on the market. Testing is critical. Once a stroke occurs, time is of the essence. The sooner therapy is started, more of the brain can be saved and the chance for survival with limited disabilities is increased. The challenge for emergency room physicians is the rapid determination that a stroke has occurred and whether the stroke was due to arterial blockage or hemorrhage. Eighty per cent of strokes are caused by a blockage of blood flow and can be treated aggressively with anticoagulants, but this treatment is inappropriate for the other 20% of strokes caused by bleeding.