UCL helps engineer design and evaluate device to heal his own heart

Engineer Tal Golesworthy was suffering from a defect in his aorta ? the main artery for carrying oxygenated blood ? that left it in danger of splitting. The genetic condition, known as Marfan syndrome, can cause instant death, but Mr Golesworthy ? anxious to avoid a lifelong dependency on anti-blood clotting drugs ? decided to devise his own treatment. He approached Tom Treasure, now at UCL's Clinical Operational Research Unit (CORU), who helped him recruit further support for his idea from the UCL Institute of Child Health and the Royal Brompton Hospital. The results of the decade-long collaboration ? published this month in the European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery's interactive journal ' were so good that Mr Golesworthy has set up a company, Exstent, to market the device. In the following piece, Tom Treasure describes how he first met Mr Golesworthy and CORU's involvement in the development of his lifesaving ExoVasc External Aortic Root Support. "It is ten years since I first met the engineer Tal Golesworthy. At that first meeting the challenge he put to me, a cardiac surgeon, was to work with him towards a better form of operation on the aorta for people who have inherited Marfan's syndrome.