Medtronic, Inc.

Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne

Pavel Kucera

Antoine N Camps

Hubert Van Den Bergh

Georges Wagnieres

Nathalie Virag

Norbert Lange

Matthieu Zellweger

Patrice Jichlinski

Mattia Bertschi

Alexandre Marti

The invention is directed to techniques for stimulating a colon of a patient to relieve chronic constipation. Specifically, a colon stimulation system applies one or more electrical stimuli to the colon of the patient in order to induce peristaltic activity in the colon to relieve chronic constipation. In accordance with the invention, the colon stimulation system induces peristaltic activity in the colon by applying an electrical stimulus to the colon to cause a portion of the colon to contract to a contracted state and removing the electrical stimulus to cause the colon to relax. While in the contracted state, the colon is substantially fully contracted.

Electrical stimulation of the colon to treat chronic constipation

The invention concerns a 5-aminolevulinic acid ester (E-ALA) solution for producing a pharmaceutical preparation useful for diagnosing and/or treating tissue and/or cell pathologies by local radiation exposure using radiation emitted by a light source energy followed, in the case diagnosis, by detection of fluorescent protoporphyrin IX (Pp1X). The E-ALA concentration in the solution is less than 1% and ranges between 0.01% and 0.5%. The low E-ALA concentration in the solution increases Pp1X synthesis and homogenises its distribution in the cell layers while highly reducing the secondary toxicity for the treated cells.

Solution for diagnosing or treating tissue pathologies

Growing community of inventors

Lausanne, Switzerland

Pavel Kucera