Newswise — Tom Merrill hopes that 28 feet of glass and plastic tubing will help save the lives of heart attack victims.
This tubing is the major component of a mock circulatory system Merrill, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Rowan University (Glassboro, N.J.), is developing with a team of engineering students, three of whom are putting in 35 hours a week on the project this summer.
They will use the system to test the "CoolGuide Catheter," which Merrill invented to quickly cool the heart after a person has suffered a heart attack.
"Tissue death rate is a function of time and temperature," Merrill said. "The cooling from the catheter would provide the additional time that would enable people to intervene with a heart attack patient in other ways and hopefully save more heart tissue at risk."
The new catheter can cool a heart about 10 times faster than existing technology, actually lowering the temperature of the blood right at the heart, rather than cooling the entire body the way current technology does.
"The mock circulatory system is a testing platform, much like a wind tunnel would be for experiments on a car," said Merrill. Using that testing platform—which will duplicate the temperature and blood flow conditions of the cardiovascular system when it is complete—Merrill and his students will be able to demonstrate that CoolGuide catheter protoypes work properly prior to preclinical testing.
The first-time professor joined the Rowan faculty in January shortly after the National Institutes of Health awarded him $950,000, his second grant from the government organization for his catheter and related research.
Originally interested in exploring ways to aid brain injury victims, Merrill got the idea for the catheter while attending a conference in 1999 on suspended animation—using extreme cold to slow bodily functions—to limit casualty rates for soldiers injured in battle.
In 2004, with financial assistance from Dr. Jay Yadav, CEO of CardioMems, Inc., of Atlanta, Merrill co-founded FocalCool, L.L.C., the research company that developed the catheter. In 2005, the NIH awarded him an initial $175,000 to pursue his research.
Merrill, 43, spent from January 2005 until July 2006 working in the partially finished basement of his circa-1964 split-level home in suburban Mercer County, N.J. While his kids (James, now 10, and Kate, now 8) played or watched TV in an adjacent room, Merrill worked in a spartan 12' x 15' cement-floored lab, complete with a furnace.
In a cutting-edge laboratory during spring semester 2008 at Rowan, Merrill worked with team of five students to build the mock loop. This summer Merrill is working with three Rowan mechanical engineering students: Chris Rakus, of Washington Township; Joe Urcinas, of Flemington; and Todd Nilsen, of Brick. Next semester, Merrill will move this research into Rowan's South Jersey Technology Park, about a mile from campus in Mantua Township.
Merrill, who also worked at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, medical device firm Abiomed Inc. and Wyeth Research prior to coming to Rowan, said the team will strive to make the catheter bio-compatible so that it does not trigger clotting. Merrill and his students also will work to reduce the size of the catheter's cooling console, which now weighs more than 200 pounds. Ultimately, Merrill hopes their work will lead to technologies focused in the area of his first interest, brain injuries.
"The American Heart Association estimates that about 30 percent of first-time heart attack patients die within one year. We hope our CoolGuide system may reduce this mortality rate. We also hope to expand the use of the system into neurological areas such a traumatic brain injury," Merrill said. "Along the way, I think Rowan students are gaining valuable engineering and entrepreneurial experience."
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