NEW YORK, Feb. 24th -- Abbott today announced the introduction of a new specialty catheter designed to help physicians access areas of blockage in the coronary arteries and other vessels in the body that may be difficult to reach. Known as the Asahi Tornus(R) specialty catheter, the new stainless steel device is engineered to deliver therapeutic, minimally invasive balloon catheters and stents to vessels blocked with dense fibrous fatty plaque -- also known as chronic occlusions. The Tornus, which was cleared for marketing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, was launched at today's session of the Third International Chronic Total Occlusion Summit.

"The Tornus stainless steel catheter gives us more support for accessing a type of occlusion that for decades has represented a major frustration for interventionalists," said interventional cardiologist Gregg W. Stone, M.D., Division of Cardiology, Columbia University Medical Center and the Cardiovascular Research Foundation, New York. "Chronic occlusions have proven so resistant to conventional interventional technology that we refer to them as the 'last frontier' in interventional therapy."

Interventional therapy, also described as minimally invasive therapy, allows some patients with vessel disease to avoid surgery by undergoing treatment with balloon catheters or stents that are threaded to specific sites of vessel disease over therapeutic wires. Before a site of vessel blockage can be opened with a balloon or stent, it must be penetrated and crossed using a wire and support catheter. This is often referred to as "crossing the lesion."


"If a lesion cannot be crossed, it cannot be treated with minimally invasive therapy, and a patient may have to be referred for open heart surgery," said Dr. Stone. "About 15 percent of the patients we see have this type of a blockage. The Tornus catheter allows us to cross dense areas of vessel blockage so they can be successfully dilated and stented."

Support catheters are intended to provide additional assistance for physicians to access lesions with therapeutic wires. While most catheters are made of conventional plastic, the Tornus catheter is made of stainless steel to provide extra support during operator handling. The proprietary Tornus design consists of several hair-thin, stainless steel strands braided together to enhance flexibility and strength, along with a safety-release valve at the proximal end to indicate when the device has reached maximum rotation, and a specialized tapered distal tip with a radio-opaque marker for optimal visualization in navigating difficult-to-access areas. The device is available in two sizes: 2.1 Fr for accessing lesions that are more difficult to navigate and 2.6 Fr for circumstances requiring more support to push through the lesion.

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