UVA Health developing tiny ‘sponge balls’ to use on patients

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WVIR) - UVA Health researchers now have more money to continue develop a way to prevent multiple surgeries for heart and dialysis patients.

The $2.8 million is coming from the National Institute of Health.

“So the focus of our research is to try to find ways to keep the blockages from coming back after the initial intervention has been performed,” Craig Kent with UVA Health said Thursday, March 7.

UVA Health says this development will stop veins from being clogged in the future.

“We’ve developed a drug or a treatment that we can apply to the artery that’s being fixed at the time it’s being fixed, that then prevents the disease from coming back so that people aren’t in trouble a second time from the same kind of a blockage in the same place,” Kent said.

The treatment used is called sponge balls

“So once we brush those tiny balls onto the plantilla vein, it’s like to deploy some tiny cars there to protect those veins from going bad and keep keep it functional for a long time,” Lian-Wang Guo with UVA Health said.

The treatment is still in the development stages, but UVA Health says the findings and research are looking promising.

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