CompliaStent: Improving Aortic Compliance in Heart Failure Patients

One of the aorta’s main jobs is to smooth out the pulsatile blood flow leaving the heart, a task made possible by the aorta’s elastic properties. With age, the aorta stiffens by many physiological mechanisms, and the increased aortic stiffening is a large contributor to heart failure.Despite a clear link between aortic stiffening and heart failure, there are no current heart failure therapies that directly target aortic stiffening as a root cause. As such, we have designed a novel intra-aortic device to re-introduce compliance into the system and restore the properties to those of a healthy, non-stiff aorta.

Our solution has two main components: an outer stent and an inner compliant biomaterial. The device is deployed like a stent, and the stent also acts to anchor the device to the aortic wall. The compliant biomaterial stores energy and is thus able to slow the pulsatile pulse waves associated with aortic stiffening. This design has been validated using a computational simulation, and we are currently in the process of constructing a to-scale prototype and testing the prototype in a physical model of the cardiovascular system.