Ian Crosbie, CEO of Sequana Medical, identifies the incidence of liver cirrhosis and the complication of liver ascites, which causes significant fluid buildup in the belly that severely impacts a patient's quality of life. Standard treatment requires repeated hospital visits to drain the fluid. The alfapump developed by Sequana is a fully implanted device that continuously drains ascites into the bladder for natural excretion, eliminating the need for drainage procedures.

Ian explains, "Liver ascites is a complication of liver cirrhosis, a serious condition where the liver becomes badly scarred. As a result, the fluid accumulates in the belly, often five to ten liters of fluid. And as you can imagine, this causes huge swelling of the belly and major clinical problems, and obviously dramatically impacts the quality of life of these patients. Problems can include instability and falling. You can imagine with all that weight out front. The swelling of the belly causes difficulty eating, breathing, sleeping, and functioning."

"So we're in an era of AI and targeted cancer therapies, CAR-T, and things like that. But the standard of care for these patients is to let them build up five to ten liters of fluid in their bellies, then bring them into hospital, stick a big needle in them, drain them over the course of five to seven hours, send them away, and then the moment they leave hospital, they start to reaccumulate that fluid again, and the process starts all over. That is a procedure known as paracentesis. Not only is it, as you can imagine, a painful, burdensome, and traumatic procedure, but in the days leading up to the procedure, the days and weeks as the fluid starts to accumulate, all those impacts on quality of life and clinical complications occur. And so that is why we developed alfapump to stop the buildup of fluid in the belly and to stop all of those problems and to stop those regular visits to the hospital."

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