Dr. Flores-Mireles outlines advantages of a catheter reprocessing device

In this video, Ana Lidia Flores-Mireles, PhD, discusses the reusable intermittent urinary catheter system and reprocessing device evaluated in the Urology study “Initial Antimicrobial Testing of a Novel Reusable Intermittent Urinary Catheter System and Catheter Reprocessing Device.” Flores-Mireles is the Janet C. and Jeffrey A. Hawk Collegiate Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana.

Transcription:

Can you elaborate on the long-term implications of this technology? Are there any potential drawbacks or limitations to consider?

One of the major issues that we have in this right now is that there is a lack of standardization. We have single-use catheters only; again, there is a lack of standardization; how to tell the user how to clean this to actually avoid a contamination and a possible UTI. The other thing is affordability. Patients cannot buy single-use catheters or just use them 1 time, because it's really costly and also, it's ecologically bad, because you're producing so much waste. There are so many catheters that are single use; people use them and then they go directly to the trash. So we see with this technology that we're bypassing all these issues.

What are the good things? We're actually standardizing how to clean the catheter, because the system tells you exactly [how]: just put it here, let it run, and then it's clean. All the solutions that we use have been cleared by FDA, so they are safe to be used. Not only this, but some intermittent catheters have no-touch features, so they reduce the contamination. But those are 4 times the price as a normal intermittent catheter would be. I'm a scientist; I'm not involved with the company. I just collaborate with them. I just did my job to test something to make sure that this was safe and that we can remove the bacteria. The idea that they have is that the price of these catheters will be similar to the standard catheters that you have outside. So we actually don't see any drawbacks, because the fact that they have been able to optimize the material to make sure that that is able to survive all the washes that we did, that we're able to remove the pathogens—if you go back to the paper, we tested every single part of the catheter to make sure that we didn't have any bacteria hiding in places. We checked everything to make sure that we don't have these hidden contaminations. And the fact that the company has been working with the FDA to get a clearance, having this oversight increases the value of the device. So to be honest, I don't see any drawbacks, because the company has been working with the FDA to have all the compliance to make sure they are safe, and in my case, as a scientist, my job was to disprove their hypothesis. I was not disproving anything with this catheter. These catheters were clean after the processing. We tested them 100 times. They survived. So far, in my point of view, with the study that we did, there are no drawbacks, and the fact that they are communicating with the FDA just increases the value of the device.

This transcription was edited for clarity.