Patients, doctors and nurses will flood Fenway Park today to learn about new ways to fight complex heart disease — courtesy of an 18-wheel trailer that transforms into a mobile laboratory.
“It’s the world’s biggest show-and-tell vehicle in the history of medical devices,” said Mike Minogue, CEO of Abiomed, Inc., a Danvers-based health technology company. “It has simulators, presentations and animations.”
Abiomed, the maker of the world’s smallest heart pump and other innovations designed for high-risk heart patients, will bring its interactive Mobile Learning Lab to Van Ness Street and Yawkey Way this afternoon to teach medical staff from local hospitals how to use its Impella devices.
Its Impella 2.5 miniature blood-pump system, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in January, keeps blood pumping through the heart and throughout the body during high-risk procedures.
The pop-up lab will include vascular models that illustrate how to insert catheters by entering the femoral artery in the thigh, Minogue said.
More than 30,000 patients across the United States have benefited from Abiomed’s heart devices since 2008, Minogue said. Fenway has the capacity to accommodate 37,673 people.
“We wanted to visualize to our employees that we’ve treated the number of patients to fill up Fenway,” he said.
Abiomed yesterday announced a corporate partnership with Fenway Park that will see its logo on the Green Monster through the rest of the season and in the ballpark next year.
The mobile lab has made stops in 80 cities.
Dr. Duane Pinto, director of the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who has used Abiomed’s devices, said the mobile lab’s Fenway stop will be a learning opportunity for local doctors.
“It’s a device that’s not used routinely day-to-day,” Pinto said. “So even if people are familiar with it, they need to keep their skills up by simulation.”
Robert W. Pasquariella of Everett, 75, experienced first-hand the benefits of the Impella devices. He had surgery to correct three blockages and fluid on the heart when he was 69. Complications led to a two-week coma, during which the Impella kept his heart beating.
“The pump gave my heart a chance to rest and heal itself,” he said. “It kept my blood going like a regular heart.”
