Concordia Magazine

A Smaller Way to Save Lives

By Roger E. Degerman

It took millions of dollars and a decade to develop, but Dr. Corey Teigen ’86 has created a medical innovation that shows great promise for saving many lives in the U.S. and worldwide every year. His big breakthrough reveals the remarkable power of thinking smaller.
Teigen has been focused on making it possible to treat a much larger percentage of the world’s population afflicted with abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA) – a life-threatening condition. To do so, he needed to find a way to scale down the size of previous stent graft technology used to operate on people with AAA.

“Previous grafts were much larger and required a more invasive surgery,” says Teigen, chair for the Department of Interventional Radiology at Sanford Health Systems in Fargo, N.D. “And they weren’t useable for a lot of people, especially more petite women who tend to have smaller blood vessels.

“My real breakthrough wasn’t really the new graft itself, but getting the technology to shove it into a very small tube. By doing so, we are making it possible to treat many more people while sparing them from a big, open operation.”

Teigen’s innovation, the InCraft™ Stent Graft System, will be used on 190 patients as part of clinical trials in the U.S. and Japan. He says if results are as favorable as expected, FDA approval and full-scale implementation of the device could begin within the next two years.

Teigen has been pursuing a smaller stent solution ever since he started using the original, larger FDA-approved devices as part of his Fargo practice in 1999. Early on, he encountered disappointment working with companies that ultimately produced two failed grafts. Teigen was frustrated by those experiences and sought a new path for bringing his ideas to reality.

In 2003, the president of Johnson & Johnson’s Cordis Corp. called on Teigen to lead a new collaborative effort. Teigen chose physicians from two other specialties – a vascular surgeon from Japan and a cardiologist from Seattle – to spearhead the development of a smaller, more effective graft. Cordis provided vital resource support – from millions in capital for product development and testing, as well as the engineers and clinical expertise – to keep the project thriving.

Teigen’s team has persevered through a long and arduous innovative cycle of idea creation, product development and rigorous testing followed by idea refinement, product redevelopment and retesting. The 10-year toil certainly took its toll.

“There were times when you thought the device was never going to come to fruition,” says Teigen. “Many times we would work to figure things out and just run into roadblock after roadblock.”

Teigen was determined to overcome the obstacles and he has – with promising progress. In 2011, Teigen’s team was granted permission to do clinical trials in Germany and Italy. He recalls the thrill of performing the first operation using the new device and seeing the remarkable results.

“It was unbelievably exciting,” he says. “To see a person come in with a life-threatening aneurysm, and then to put the graft in with two tiny incisions and have him go home the same day was amazing. That’s when the impact of all this work really hit me.”

To date, Teigen has implanted his new device in 22 patients, including the first one in the U.S. as part of the current U.S.-Japan dual trial. He says the postoperative data has been excellent. If the trials continue to be as successful as expected, full-scale global use of the device will likely soon be permitted.

The impact could be huge. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, AAA occur in 5 to 7 percent of people age 60 and older in the U.S., resulting in the loss of 15,000 lives each year. Worldwide, it’s estimated that AAA affect 24 million people. Thanks to Teigen’s new device, a much larger percentage of those afflicted will be saved.

“I view it as I have God-given talents that should be used to improve health care,” he says. “I just have the desire to make something better and to be part of something bigger than myself.”

Even as Teigen celebrates the early success of his current invention, he is already engaged in other innovative efforts. His work on a new device to treat thoracic aneurysms is quickly advancing and he expects it to be in FDA trials within the next year. He sees moving medicine forward as his never-ending goal and responsibility.

“I think you always have to be innovating,” says Teigen. “When you see something that is going to improve the lives of others, you have to step forward and do something about it.”

Photo: Mike Smith, Sanford Health

 

Information For:

current students
faculty and staff		 parents
alumni		 high school students
admitted students