Mitral Valve Pioneer: An Interview With Evalve’s Ferolyn Powell And Fred St. Goar

Article preview from IN VIVO - June, 2013

Transcatheter aortic valve replacement is all the rage today, but potentially larger is the mitral valve market, a market that can also be bewilderingly complex. The story of mitral valve pioneer Evalve illustrates both the challenges and promise of mitral valve repair and replacement.

 Mitral Valve Pioneer: An Interview With Evalve’s Ferolyn Powell And Fred St. Goar

Article preview from IN VIVO - June, 2013

Transcatheter aortic valve replacement is all the rage today. But potentially larger is the mitral valve market, a market that can also be bewilderingly complex. The story of mitral valve pioneer Evalve illustrates both the challenges and promise of the market.

At this year’s Paris Course on Revascularization (PCR) meeting, much as they have at every cardiovascular conference over the past several years, transcatheter aortic valve (TAVI) devices held center stage – rivaled only by renal denerevation and bioabsorbable scaffolds – as a technology with enormous clinical and economic value. Less prominent, though certainly the subject of a number of clinical sessions, were devices used in mitral valve repair and replacement. Still, few industry executives and cardiologists believe mitral’s second-place status is likely to last much longer. In some ways, TAVI already seems close to becoming a mature market, with robust clinical trials supporting the devices now coming to market from market leaders Edwards Lifesciences Corp. and Medtronic Inc. and a handful of second-generation valves at or nearing commercialization in Europe as well. But as the mitral valve sessions drew the kind of early curiosity that TAVI saw just a few years ago, many noted that mitral valve has the potential to surpass percutaneous aortic valve, though with the caveat that the mitral valve space is significantly more complex and diverse than aortic, which could slow the market’s development. As Fred St. Goar, MD, the interventional cardiologist behind mitral valve pioneer Evalve, notes in the following interview, “What’s going on in the aortic space is great, but mitral valve disease is an even bigger clinical problem. It’s a more heterogeneous disease process and thus more challenging and complex to figure out.”

 

Indeed, interest in the mitral valve space is nothing new – companies have been at it for well over a decade – which in many respects makes the Evalve story that much more compelling. The pioneer in mitral valves, Evalve today is the only company close to commercialization in the US, and has left a dozen companies in its wake. But as impressive as Evalve’s story has been in the mitral valve space, the story is even more interesting from the broader perspective. Born out of medtech comet Heartport, Evalve was the first project taken on by the then-fledgling incubator, The Foundry, eventually becoming The Foundry’s first major success. Perhaps most impressively, the company’s 2009 acquisition by Abbott Laboratories Inc. seemed at the time an incredibly rich deal for a company at that stage of development.

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