Consortium as a whole

The ESPOIR project brings together a leading consortium of world-class clinical centres specialized in cardio-thoracic surgery (Partners 1-8), two high-volume tissue banks (Partners 10 and 11), an innovative start-up Biotech-SME (Corlife GbR) and an experienced project management office (Partner 12). Twelve partners from 6 different EU Member States (DE, NL, UK, IT, FR, and BE) and 1 state associated to the Framework Programme (CH) and one International Cooperation Partner Country (MD) will cooperate within this multi-disciplinary network to validate and upscale a promising novel approach in the field of regenerative medicine. 

A critical mass of excellence is generated by drawing together the extensive and complimentary expertise of the clinical partners in the areas of state-of-the-art heart valve replacement for congenital and acquired heart defects. Participants have been selected based on their well-established and renowned track records in congenital heart surgery, including special expertise in right ventricular outflow tract procedures, and other resources such as large volume surgical programs which thereby secure adequate patient recruitment to the ESPOIR trial. Several participants (Partners 1, 3, 4, 5 and 7) have previously successfully cooperated within the European Contegra® multicentre study led by Dr. Breymann from the MHH and thereby created valuable data which is needed to compare DHV to conventional valve protheses. Furthermore, the principle investigators have been well-networked with one another over a number of years through participation in various professional associations (see Section 3 for further details). This strong clinical network is rounded up by two large tissue banks with decades of experience in tissue procurement and through the unique expertise of corlife, which holds the patent for processing DHV and thus is sponsor of the clinical trial.