Cleveland Clinic Unveils Top Medical Innovations for 2015

In first place is the mobile stroke unit. Using telemedicine, in-hospital stroke neurologists interpret symptoms via broadband video link, while an onboard crew performs neurological evaluation and administers t-PA after stroke detection, providing faster, effective treatment for the affected patient.

Second is a Dengue fever vaccine that could aid the 50-100 million people in more than 100 countries that contract the dengue virus each year.

In third place is the advent of cost-effective, fast, painless blood-testing, which uses a drop of blood drawn from the fingertip in a virtually painless procedure. Test results are available within hours of the original draw.

Fourth is the expected approval of injectable PCSK9 inhibitors for cholesterol reduction for those who do not benefit from statins.

Fifth are new antibody-drug conjugates that offer a promising new approach for advanced cancer treatment by selectively delivering cytotoxic agents to tumor cells while avoiding normal, healthy tissue.

Next are immune checkpoint inhibitors that allow physicians to make significantly more progress against advanced cancer. The novel drugs boost the immune system and offer significant, long-term cancer remissions for patients with metastatic melanoma and other types of malignancies.

In seventh place is the leadless cardiac pacemaker, a capsule-sized wireless cardiac pacemaker that can be implanted directly in the heart without surgery, eliminating malfunction complications and restrictions on daily physical activities.

Eighth are pirfenidone and nintedanib, new drugs for treating idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) that slow the disease progress of the lethal lung disease, which causes scarring of the air sacs.

Next to last is intraoperative radiation therapy (IORT) for early stage breast cancer, which focuses the radiation on the tumor during surgery as a single-dose, and has proven effective as whole breast radiation.

Closing the list is angiotensin-receptor neprilysin inhibitor (ARNI), a unique drug compound that represents a paradigm shift in heart failure (HF) therapy because of its impressive survival advantage over the ACE inhibitor enalapril, the current “gold standard” for treating patients with HF.

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