Cornell engineers are aiming to create a big leap in vascular grafts, used to combat cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death worldwide.
The biodegradable graft looks like a tough, stretchy straw. It not only expands and contracts like veins and arteries do as blood pumps through it. The graft is also biodegradable – it allows new vascular cells to grow in and around it as the body absorbs it. The team is hoping to improve the current vascular graft technology, which is only applicable for vessels larger than 5 millimeters.
“Every year, between end-stage renal disease and cardiovascular disease, there are millions of people suffering and dying. There is not a viable treatment option for a lot of these patients. And we think our technology can become that,” said Anthony D’Amato, a former postdoctoral researcher in the lab of biological engineer and professor Yadong Wang, where the synthetic graft is being developed.
At left, Yadong Wang, the McAdam Family Foundation Professor of Heart Assist Technology at Cornell Engineering, is co-founder of Anova Biomedical.
Wang and D’Amato are co-founders of Anova Biomedical.
The materials used to repair cardiovascular structures have basically remained the same since the 1960s, said Wang, the McAdam Family Foundation Professor of Heart Assist Technology at Cornell Engineering.
“The current technology is good enough for certain applications,” Wang said. “It’s definitely not good enough for all.”
With the help of Cornell’s venture incubation ecosystem, Anova has hit several milestones. “It would have been a lot harder” without Cornell’s assistance, Wang said.
The Center for Technology Licensing awarded D’Amato $180,000 in 2022 through its Ignite Fellow for New Ventures program. He was in the first cohort of the initiative, which offers Cornell researchers a one-year training program to learn how to create and run a start-up and commercialize technologies that come out of faculty labs.
“The idea is to accelerate and facilitate the commercialization of Cornell technology into new start-ups and keep the researchers involved in them,” D’Amato said. So far, Anova has licensed 11 patents from the Wang lab, including intellectual property in composition, design and manufacturing.
After D’Amato graduated from the Ignite program in July 2024, he became Anova’s CEO.
That’s also when a collaboration between Anova and Cornell was awarded a $65,000 manufacturing grant from FuzeHub, a not-for-profit that supports small and medium-sized manufacturing companies in New York state.
Cornell’s Center for Life Science Ventures, a residential startup incubator on the Ithaca campus, admitted Anova to its ranks two months later, in September 2024.
That assistance has helped Anova create the fourth iteration of its graft design. The material, an elastomer, springs back into shape after it is stretched, but is also very strong. “I literally cannot break it,” Wang said. “It’s a very, very tough material.”
The Cornell support has helped catalyze other national and regional funding. The National Science Foundation awarded Anova a $275,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant to fund a one-year project to further develop a 3D printing resin in August 2024.
And in October 2024, Anova beat out 12 other startups to win first place and a $150,000 investment in the FuzeHub Commercialization Competition at the New York State Innovation Summit.
A 25-year journey
Wang began working on the technology in 2000, as a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of his adviser, Robert Langer ’70, the most cited engineer in history and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A surgeon, Dr. Jay Vacanti, had asked Langer to create a biodegradable material with elasticity that could be used to repair the liver. Langer pointed to Wang and said, “Ask him!”
So Wang set to work.
“But once I made the material, I thought, ‘OK, what’s the most demanding environment where this elastomer can really shine, where the current material may not be good enough?’” Wang said. “That’s when I started working on blood vessels.”
Structurally, the material is a metallo-elastomer – a polymer that is similar to natural rubber and composed of molecules that behave like random coils. When the elastomer is exposed to metal ions, the random coils bind together. The elastomer then behaves like a three-dimensional fishing net – and mimics the natural elasticity of arteries and veins.
“You can pull on it, and it will extend,” Wang said. “But the minute the force goes away, because it is tied down by these knots, it will go back to the original shape.”
When a person has a blocked artery, the first option is to implant a stent or to take a vein or artery from their leg and use it to replace the clogged one. That comes with its own problems.
For example, when D’Amato’s father needed an emergency bypass during heart surgery, doctors had to very quickly cut his leg open and take out a vein graft.
Anova Biomedical’s first-of-its-kind biodegradable graft material for cardiovascular patients not only expands and contracts likek blood vessels; it is also absorbed into the body as new cells take its place.
It saved his life – but there were down sides that prompted D’Amato to join Wang’s lab.
“His leg didn’t heal. He still limps,” D’Amato said. “Ten years later, he has a tremendous amount of scarring, and he’s not an active person. And he was relatively healthy. You know, if this happens with a diabetic or a very old person, it could be much worse.”
If a graft from the patient is unavailable, surgeons can insert a graft – like a hollow wire –made of Teflon, the same material used to coat nonstick pans and waterproof jackets.
But grafts are very stiff compared to arteries, and the mismatch creates a lot of problems. “So what happens at the junction between the stiff tube and the soft tube?” Wang said. “There’s a lot of tension there, so that creates inflammation and scarring over time. So it closes down again.”
That’s why grafts fail about 20% to 70% of the time, depending on the location of the implant.
Moreover, grafts don’t work well in areas where arteries are smaller than 5 millimeters in diameter, like below the knee. “You hear about diabetics getting their feet amputated,” D’Amato said. “That’s because there’s no good option to bypass below the knee.”
Not only does Anova’s material expand and contract as blood flows through, it also will degrade in 9-12 months as a new blood vessel regenerates in its place.
“So we don’t have to worry about this foreign material staying in the body forever, creating inflammation, causing a risk of thrombus and clot formation, causing this mechanical mismatch that causes all these other problems,” D’Amato said.
Although the eventual goal is to use the graft in cardiac patients, the first application will be for dialysis patients. They either get teflon grafts, or surgeons join an artery to a vein to create a loop where the blood can be directed to the dialysis machine, then pumped back into the body. That method fails within a year 60% of the time, D’Amato said.
“When you talk to people going through dialysis, they say it’s like torture,” he said. “They’re nearing end of life and they’re suffering, and it’s a huge time commitment. It’s very painful for them, emotionally and physically.”
An experiment in March will help Anova lock the graft’s final design.
Assistance from CTL and Cornell’s incubator network has helped Anova get to that point, Wang said.
“They’ve helped us refine our idea, connect us to advisers who understand the regulatory path and who have brought companies from the seed and startup stage to maturity or to an exit,” Wang said. “So we learned a lot just through this engagement with this community.”