CLEAR system

Insera Therapeutics has announced that the first two ischaemic stroke patients have been treated with its cyclic aspiration system CLEAR. The company received the CE mark for the system in March 2019. The CLEAR aspiration system is a digital vacuum aspiration system that allows operators to employ uniform suction or cyclical suction patterns. The pump can be optionally operated via an iPad app, which also collects system of care chronology such as time metrics in the stroke chain of survival as well as key angiosuite metrics such as eTICI outcomes.

Vladimir Kalousek (Sisters of Charity Hospital, Zagreb, Croatia) says: “We used the CLEAR aspiration system to remove blood clots from two stroke patients, one from the anterior circulation and the other from the posterior circulation. I am extremely pleased with the device and believe the cyclical nature of the aspiration offers unique safety and efficacy advantages over existing devices.”

He added that the system was used as the primary therapy for the patient, resulting in a first pass eTICI 3 outcome (complete vessel reopening) within six minutes. “The first patient had a blood clot resulting in a large vessel occlusion in the M1 segment of the middle cerebral artery and had a witnessed stroke onset in the early time window. The second patient had a blood clot in the posterior circulation in the basilar artery with extremely tortuous vessels and had an unknown time of stroke onset as she woke up with stroke symptoms. Cyclical aspiration was used successfully in conjunction with stent retriever technology for removing the entirety of the clot,” he added.

Vikram Janardhan, CEO of Insera Therapeutics, comments: “Our unique aspiration technology offers the ability to vary the vacuum suction pressures and intervals within the safe vacuum suction range up to -98.2 kPa (-29 inHg) with the explicit goal of increasing first-pass recanalization, reducing vessel vasospasm and resulting clot fragmentation compared to static aspiration (namely uniform suction pressure).”