Article preview from Start-Up - September 1, 2011
With foresight, good timing, or simply years of experience, the founders of Sequent Medical (who also founded MicroVention) are launching a new endovascular product in Europe just as large companies are signalling their interest in the space via acquisitions. For the treatment of cerebral aneurysms, Sequent has developed a novel device that combines the best attributes of embolization coils and flow diverters, its founders believe.
Article preview from Start-Up - September 1, 2011
The neurovascular device market has been a long time in the making. Stroke is a large medically important disease; there are 795,000 strokes in the US alone each year, and its consequences are devastating to both patients and health care systems. For medical device companies, it also represents an important, largely unpenetrated market, and for too long it has remained tantalizing in the classic sense of the term; it was promising, yet just out of reach. Many companies have tried, without success, to introduce interventional devices into the stroke market. The recent setback for Wingspan, an intracranial stent (developed by Boston Scientific Corp., and now owned by StrykerCorp.) underscores the difficulties in this space. In early September, the SAMMPRIS trial (Stenting vs. Aggressive Medical Management for Preventing Recurrent Stroke for Intracranial Stenosis) was halted early when it became clear that the stented group had more than twice the rate of recurrent stroke than the patients on medical therapy.
Companies looking to develop device-based stroke therapies have traditionally been stymied by the dynamics of the disease – stroke must be treated within hours of onset in order for most current therapies to be effective. The field has also suffered from a lack of awareness on the part of patients and caregivers as to the appropriate course of treatment. That awareness has been steadily increasing over the past decade and a half. At the same time, the neurovascular specialty has been undergoing a transformation from a surgical to an interventional product segment since the introduction, in the late 1980s, of the first coils delivered by catheter to the brain for the treatment of aneurysms that can cause hemorrhagic stroke. Today, finally, there are signs that the neurovascular market has reached a tipping point, at least according to the number of large companies that have lent their support to the category within the past year. Indeed, for those companies, interventional neurology offers the kinds of good, old-fashioned growth drivers upon which, until recently, these companies have been able to rely on in other emerging interventional specialties, most notably cardiology...
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By Mary Stuart
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