Interventional Heart Failure

Medical device investors who have avoided heart failure, because of the long and uncertain development course of ventricular assist devices, should take another look. The minimally invasive revolution in heart failure, to some extent a logical extension of interventional cardiology's migration into other areas of structural heart disease like heart valves and PFOs, is providing new device opportunities, which have the potential to get to market sooner and at the same address an even larger patient population than heart failure devices that came before.

The dismal tale about chronic heart failure has often been told: five million people in the US have a progressive disease that will kill 70 to 80% of them within eight years of diagnosis, and there is no cure, apart from heart transplantation, in sight. Therapy consists of drugs for early-stage patients, to manage the symptoms but not the progression of disease. Cardiac resynchronization therapy devices provide some benefit, but only to about a third of the 15% of all heart failure patients eligible for them; and finally, at the end stages of the disease, certain patients well enough to undergo major invasive surgery get left ventricular assist devices (LVADs), implantable pumps that replace the functioning of the heart by keeping end-organs perfused, gaining them perhaps two or three additional years of life. Millions of chronic heart failure patients have essentially had no beneficial therapies available to them.

Well, there’s a new chapter in heart failure, and it looks like it’s going to have a happier ending. New...

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