Two Small Companies See Huge Opportunities In Heart Failure Device Space

Article preview from Medtech Insight - March 27, 2013

CardioKinetix, maker of a unique, percutaneously placed ventricular partitioning device, and CircuLite, which is developing a less invasive cardiac assist device, are moving into US clinical trials with their technologies – an important milestone for emerging companies in the difficult heart failure space. Both offer therapies aimed at helping fill the huge heart failure treatment gap that exists today.

Two Small Companies See Huge Opportunities In Heart Failure Device Space

Article preview from Medtech Insight - March 27, 2013

Heart failure (HF) is one of the most compelling and fastest-growing opportunities in the cardiovascular device market, with patient numbers climbing rapidly – more than six million live with HF in the US today and that number is expected to reach at least nine million by 2030 – and a large percentage of patients in the midstream of disease progression currently have few effective treatment options. By 2030, researchers estimate that the total annual economic cost of HF in the US will reach $97 billion, more than double what it was in 2010.

But the HF space also is an area ripe with innovation, and small, emerging companies are beginning to reap the rewards of their often long and arduous pathway from device concept to market reality. Recently, two such companies with promising and unique device technologies for HF announced they had reached important milestones in their pursuit of US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for their devices. Both are targeting the treatment gap that currently exists between early-stage HF, which is most commonly treated with drug therapy, and late-stage HF, which is treated with highly invasive surgically implanted ventricular assist devices (VADs) and/or a heart transplant. Patients who fall in the middle between those two extremes are often left with no good treatment options, and they are heavy contributors to the high hospital readmission rates (which average about 25% at 30 days) currently seen with HF patients. Those high rates are now the target of a new program initiated last October by the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that levies financial penalties on hospitals with excess 30-day HF readmissions.

All of this leads to a patient care arena in dire need of innovation – and CardioKinetix Inc. and CircuLite Inc. hope to be among the first of the many emerging HF device companies able to capitalize on that need.

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