MD Buyline analysts captivated a packed room of biomedical engineers at the AAMI annual meeting on Sunday with a presentation on the top emerging technologies.

“When you sit in a capital budget meeting, you always hear those topics about how medical technology is the reason for the exorbitant rate of health care costs,” said James Laskaris, senior emerging technology analyst at MD Buyline. “One thing you really have to consider is that technology drives virtually all diagnoses and therapies out there.”

He went on to explain that the evolving health care environment is changing the way a technology’s return on investment is calculated. Hospitals are recognizing that when they invest upfront in a specific piece of technology, they can lower costs elsewhere.

“We are also looking at quality, value and cost savings,” said Laskaris. “Now quality is being financially incentivized by CMS, so it makes a big difference.”

3-D bioprinting
One of the most notable technologies discussed was 3-D bioprinting. Current technology allows scientists to grow biological cells in a lab and transplant them into the patient, but this new technology allows physicians to print structures such as skin tissue, heart, bone, muscle and lung.

The process involves liquefying cells from a patient or donor and then depositing them layer by layer on a scaffold based on the patient’s custom configuration. The cells then incubate until they become viable tissue.

“Major organs are years away, like the heart, but what we’re really focusing on are pretty simple structures for repair parts,” said Jessica Everitt, analyst at MD Buyline. “The idea would be to repair an existing structure with the patient’s own tissue rather than them having to have a donor organ.”

The 3-D printers cost around $100,000 and the liquefying agent costs $1,000 per 100 cc. There are many vendors in this space, and these devices will hopefully hit the market in the next few years, according to Everitt.

A kidney, liver and heart transplant can cost $150,000, $250,000 and $860,000 respectively, not including the cost of lifetime drug therapy. The benefit of 3-D bioprinting is that it’s a less costly procedure and involves lower long-term costs.

Nanobots
Another rapidly growing trend is nanotechnology and more specifically, nanobots. These robots are one billionth of a meter and can be used to treat cancer and certain infections.

“Currently it’s estimated to be a one trillion dollar business in the U.S. only,” said Lidia Chelkowska, clinical analyst at MD Buyline.

The nanobots, which are coated with a thrombotic agent like tPA, are deployed directly into the bloodstream to arrive at the blood clot site and release the agent. Early studies have shown that it takes between five and 29 minutes for the clot to be fully dissolved, which is about 100 times faster than current intravenous treatment.

The technology is still under development at the university, but it’s estimated to cost between $10,000 and $20,000.

Stroke costs approximately $73 billion per year to treat, according to Chelkowska.

Treatment can cost between $10,000 and $21,000 for a patient with good outcomes and up to $30,000 for a patient with poor outcomes.

“[These nanobots] give hospitals a huge financial incentive to provide successful treatment and good outcomes,” said Chelkowska.

Viral blood filters
Viral blood filters are designed to filter the blood from infections, parasites, cancer, hepatitis C, Ebola virus, Zika virus, West Nile virus, herpes and more. There are currently two methods that have shown promise — Wyss Institute’s biospleen device and Aethlon Medical’s Hemopurifier.

The biospleen uses magnetic nanobeads coated with a protein that attracts pathogens from the bloodstream and filters it through the device. It pulls the pathogens into channels and allows the filtered blood to re-enter the patient.

Research has shown that 90 percent of pathogens were removed in only five hours using the biospleen.

The Hemopurifier uses a plant-derived protein antibody that binds to the virus particles in the blood and confines them to tubules to allow the filtered blood to re-enter the patient. It takes about 12 minutes for the whole volume of blood in the human body to be filtered.

A patient infected with Ebola in Germany was treated with the Hemopurifier when all other treatments failed. The physicians attached it to the dialysis machine and it took only 6.5 hours to lower the viral load from 400,000 per milliliter to only 1,000 per milliliter, which is a load the body can fight on its own.

In addition, it takes 1.5 days of continuous filtering to lower the viral blood load of a patient with HIV to undetectable levels.

This technology costs between $6,000 and $10,000 depending on the design of the system — free-standing units or units integrated into dialysis machines.

Central-line-associated infections affect about 80,000 patients annually in the U.S. and each case can cost $45,000 to treat.

“At this point it seems like almost all bacteria are resistant to multiple drugs, and we are running out of options,” said Chelkowska. “So this blood filter offers a mechanical approach to treatment.”