
Our impact
Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide despite tremendous success in new therapeutics and technologies in recent decades.
One reason for this is because we do not fully understand disease progression and side effects of interventions. Many drugs and medical devices that look promising during development, however, do not show efficacy in the clinic. Drugs fail to reduce disease burden. Medical devices cause complications such as blood clotting (thrombosis) and require patients to receive blood thinning drugs as mitigation. This failure is largely to do with the fact that many model systems we use to evaluate drugs and devices in the laboratory do not adequately replicate clinical conditions.
We use engineering principles to replicate clinical conditions, such as blood flow, in the laboratory on a small scale. We also take inspiration from nature to design new materials to be used in medical devices to reduce their side effects.