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Stentys appoints Hikmat Hojeibane as Chief Technology Officer

Publiée le 30/08/2007

Stentys appoints Hikmat Hojeibane as Chief Technology Officer

Former R&D Director at Johnson and Johnson will oversee further development of Stentys’ next-generation dedicated stent for treatment of blocked coronary artery bifurcations

“Hikmat possesses more than two decades of medical technology industry experience bringing complex and minimally invasive vascular technologies to fruition while working for companies such as Johnson and Johnson, C.R. Bard and B.Braun Medical, which will no doubt bolster our development efforts going forward.”
Gonzague Issenmann, Co-Founder and CEO, Stentys

PARIS, Aug. 30, 2007——Stentys announced today that it has appointed Hikmat Hojeibane as its Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Stentys is developing the world’s first next-generation dedicated drug-eluting stent for treatment of blocked coronary artery bifurcations so that hundreds of thousands of patients might avoid open-chest surgery.

Previously at Johnson and Johnson, Hikmat Hojeibane held several technical leadership positions with increasing responsibility and R&D leadership, including Director of Technology Assessments for Ethicon; Director of R&D for Cardiovations, Johnson and Johnson’s cardiac surgery division; and Engineering Fellow at Cordis, the world’s leading stent company, where he led the development of novel vascular stents and other breakthrough technologies for the treatment of vascular diseases. Prior to Johnson and Johnson, Mr. Hojeibane played a key role in driving new technologies embedded in start-up companies, including CryoCath (Montreal), where he served as Vice President of Product Development.

“Hikmat brings more than 20 years of medical technology industry experience to Stentys, and will certainly play a key and decisive role in helping Stentys make treatment of blocked coronary artery bifurcations as simple and effective as a conventional stenting procedure,” said Stentys’ CEO and co-founder, Gonzague Issenmann.

Coronary artery disease is caused by fatty lesions that narrow the coronary artery’s inside diameter (stenosis), consequently reducing the blood flow and depriving the heart muscle of oxygen. The dramatic consequence of this blockage is an often-lethal myocardial infarction (heart attack). Bifurcation is the area where one main vessel branches out into two smaller vessels, one being the continuation of the main vessel, and the other often referred to as the side branch. Narrowings at a bifurcation site are quite common. Indeed, 18 percent of percutaneous coronary interventions involve a bifurcation stenosis. Of those, restenosis (re-occurrence of the blockage) occurs in 20-25 percent of bifurcations treated with drug-eluting stents (DES).

The patent-pending innovation of Stentys’ bifurcated stent is that the stent-opening for the side branch can be created anywhere in the stent after it is implanted in the vessel. In short, the procedure’s success is independent from accurate positioning. The Stentys procedure is performed in three simple steps: (1) Stentys is implanted in the main vessel with an approximate positioning, like a standard stent; (2) the cardiologist chooses the optimal location for the side branch opening by inserting a balloon through the stent mesh, which is a cath lab-standard procedure; and, (3) the balloon inflation disconnects the mesh and creates the opening——Stentys’ self-expanding property allows the in situ modeling of the stent to fit the patient’s unique arterial anatomy.

Based in Paris, Stentys intends to make treatment of blocked coronary artery bifurcations as simple and effective as a regular stenting procedure.