The FDA granted breakthrough device designation to Royal Philips NV for its laser-assisted inferior vena cava (IVC) filter removal device. The Amsterdam-based company designed the device to ablate tissue for removing an IVC filter when previous methods of removal have already failed.
The U.K. National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) said devices used to repair paravalvular leak around replaced mitral or aortic valves should only be used in studies because of a limited set of data on efficacy.
The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) had previously waded into a sea of opposition from device makers and medical societies alike in its proposal to eliminate the inpatient-only (IPO) list. The new administration at CMS has proposed to reverse that move and sustain the IPO, which should alleviate concerns that outpatient procedures will ding the reputations of these devices.
Rivus Pharmaceuticals Inc. has emerged from stealth and disclosed a $35 million series A round to fund development of its pipeline of “controlled metabolic accelerators,” or CMAs, for treating cardiometabolic diseases.
In the July 12, 2021, issue of Nature Aging, researchers working at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging describe analysis from 1,001 immunomes of generally healthy patients correlating soluble immune biomarkers against measures of multimorbidity, immunosenescence, frailty and cardiovascular disease over 11 years of longitudinal study.
The FDA has granted breakthrough device designation to Endologix LLC for its Chimney Endovascular Aneurysm Sealing (ChEVAS) system. The device, which is intended for use in treating aortic aneurysms, is currently being evaluated in a multicenter pivotal study. The ChEVAS system is an endovascular abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) therapy designed to combine the Nellix 3.5 endograft with parallel visceral chimney stents to enable treatment of patients with juxtarenal, pararenal and suprarenal AAA.
On the heels of enrolling the first patient in a pivotal trial of a ventricular restoration system to treat symptomatic heart failure patients in January, Ancora Heart Inc. closed $80 million in new financing on Monday. The startup company plans to use the new funding to speed up this pivotal trial in preparation for FDA approval of its Accucinch ventricular restoration system.
A research team from the National University Health System (NUHS) was awarded a translational grant of S$4.9 million (US$3.6 million) from the National Research Foundation Singapore Central Gap Fund to further develop its personalized mitral valve bioprosthesis. Currently, around 500 patients in Singapore and more than 1 million around the world require mitral valve surgery annually.
Cytokinetics Inc. CEO Robert Blum declined to remark upon what one analyst called “the elephant in the room” as the company popped the lid off positive top-line data from the first and second cohorts of the phase II study with CK-3773274 (known by the shorthand CK-274) in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM).