Nitesh Katta
Baylor College of Medicine, TX·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
When the arteries feeding the heart stiffen with calcium deposits, the standard repair — threading a catheter in to open the vessel and leave a stent behind — becomes much harder. Calcified arteries resist expansion, so stents may not deploy or fully open, drugs spread unevenly across the vessel wall, and the result can be re-narrowing or a clot forming on the stent.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
Engineering
- Topics
coronary artery calcification
percutaneous coronary intervention
metasurface optics
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2029
What they work on
- Design and manufacture sub-millimeter metasurface optics — surfaces patterned below the wavelength of light to shape a beam — that fit within an optical guidewire for coronary procedures.
- Develop and optimize percutaneous coronary intervention workflows for laser-induced intravascular lithotripsy, using controlled laser dosimetry to crack calcium deposits and restore vessel compliance.
- Enable guidance of the optical guidewire by multimodal imaging that returns cross-sectional vessel anatomy and physiology as reliable outcome measures during intervention.
- Evaluate long-term treatment efficacy and safety of metasurface optical guidewire-based intervention for coronary artery calcification in preclinical animal models.
More about the research
This project develops a new kind of guidewire, the thin wire that leads catheters through a vessel, that carries light to the blockage and can both treat and see the tissue it is treating.
Why it matters
Heavily calcified coronary arteries are a common reason stent procedures fail, leading to restenosis or stent thrombosis in patients with coronary artery disease. A guidewire that cracks calcium with precisely dosed laser pulses while imaging the vessel could let interventional cardiologists treat these lesions with fewer complications and judge the result during the procedure rather than afterward.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Vinay Kini
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether commonly used claims-based measures of low-value care for patients with coronary artery disease are accurate by comparing them against the gold standard of medical chart review.
Alexander Vezeridis
Stanford University, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Miniaturize catheter-based electrochemical impedance spectroscopy sensing technology onto microcatheters, the small-caliber catheters used for embolization that can track through small blood vessels.
Clint Miller
University of Virginia, VA·Genetics
Determine how FHL5, a helper protein that tunes gene activity, causes vascular dysfunction through the actin cytoskeleton, the extracellular matrix and vessel constriction. The work will use human vascular cells and arteries studied ex vivo.
The school
Baylor College of Medicine: 38 labs on PI Pages, $881M a year on research, 115 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.