Cardiac surgery marked an important advance, with the first beating heart implant in humans of a new transcatheter mitral prosthesis, successfully performed at the Molinette hospital in Turin.

The mitral valve is located on the left side of the heart and is an inlet valve. It opens to allow blood to enter the left ventricle (the main pumping chamber of the heart) and closes to prevent blood from coming back.

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Human heart

The new prosthesis is called Epygon and is an Italian-French project. To position this prosthesis there is no need to resort to traditional extracorporeal circulation, the technique adopted in what is called "open heart surgery". These are procedures called "catheters", which are carried out by specialized groups, called Heart Teams.

This technique is already applied worldwide on the aortic valve for very elderly patients or patients at high operative risk. Applying it on the mitral valve is much more difficult because the anatomy of this valve is much more complex.

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Molinette Hospital, Turin

The surgery was performed at the Cardio-thoraco-vascular department of the Molinette by Professor Stefano Salizzoni, assisted by Dr. Michele La Torre and Dr. Antonio Montefusco. The patient is a 62-year-old woman who suffered from a severe form of mitral regurgitation, judged untreatable with traditional cardiac surgery for multiple risk factors. The operation was perfectly successful and the patient was transferred to rehabilitation after only 5 days of hospitalization.

The new Epygon prosthesis has a design that minimizes the risks of bothering the other structures of the heart, and, thanks to the particularity of having only two leaflets (all mitral biological prostheses have three), allows to reproduce the physiological flow of blood in the left ventricle, imitating the original valve and thus also improving the function of the heart muscle.

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Molinette Hospital, new mitral prosthesis implanted with beating heart

The idea of Epygon was born in the biopark of Colleretto Giacosa (a small Canavese town near Ivrea) by a group of Piedmontese bioengineers from the historic Sorin group, leader in the 80s and 90s in the field of biological cardiac prostheses, to finance its development was the French Affluent Medical group