EBAMed SA is a Swiss startup based in Geneva whose mission is to enable safe and effective non-invasive treatments of heart arrhythmias with protontherapy. The company is currently developing a medical device to enable non-invasive heart motion imaging and real-time synchronization of the therapeutic beam. This device consists in both hardware and software components and expands treatment possibilities for existing protontherapy centres, enabling them for the first time to treat heart patients.

While protontherapy has existed in centres for many years for the treatment of cancer, until now the rhythms of the heart, its constant beating, were a brake on protontherapy treatment for heart arrythmias. By bringing the first medical product for protontherapy of heart arrhythmias to the market, EBAMed believes it can provide medical doctors with an effective and practical method to treat more patients at an earlier stage of disease, before their quality of life has dropped significantly due to their heart arrythmia.

The foundational understanding on the use of protons for arrhythmia treatment is based on pre-clinical research performed by EBAMed’s co-founder team. Pilot clinical trials with radiotherapy demonstrated the potential increase of effectiveness of non-invasive cardiac ablation.

Proton beams have the physical characteristic of depositing most of their energy in the last few millimetres of their path. By adjusting the beam’s position and energy, the targeted 3D volume, in this case the heart, can be precisely covered, sparing surrounding healthy tissues.

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Heart arrhythmias are disruptions in the normal heartbeat. They affect around 15 million people in Europe and North America and are expected to at least double in the next 50 years as the population ages. Depending on the type of arrythmia, patients can be treated with medicine or with surgery, and sometimes both are needed. Non-pharmacological interventions, called ablations, are often used to treat arrhythmias. They consist in burning specific heart tissues to stop the local conduction of the disrupted electrical signals.

Because catheter ablation is an invasive procedure, patients tend to wait longer for treatment, with a consequent drop in quality of life and aggravation of the arrythmia. There are up to 600,000 catheter ablation procedures per year in Europe and North America. Apart from the patient discomfort due to the surgical procedure (under partial or total anaesthesia) and the high cost due to the length (2-7 hours) and manpower required (up to 10 medical staff), the treatment effectiveness varies largely between 20%-80%.

For more information of catheter ablation for the treatment of heart arrhythmias, please visit this page.