Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) continues to grow, so it is little surprise that the 2022 Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) annual meeting featured multiple presentations about TAVR-related devices and outcomes. The American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association’s latest guidelines recommends TAVR for patients over age 80 and surgery for those under age 65. Those in the middle can go either way, depending on comorbidities and patient preferences.
In an unexpected turn of events, Medtronic plc presented results from the Symplicity HTN-3 trial at year 3 showed sustained reductions in blood pressure with radiofrequency renal denervation (RDN) for resistant hypertension, contrary to the trial’s results at the six-month mark—and it wasn’t alone in showing positive results for the procedure.
Inari Medical Inc. released results from its 800-person Flowtriever All-Comer Registry for Patient Safety and Hemodynamics (FLASH) registry in pulmonary embolism (PE) at the 2022 Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics conference in Boston on Sept. 18 showing that treatment of PE with its Flowtriever device provided immediate hemodynamic and symptom improvement with all-cause mortality rates under 1.0% at 30 days.
One of the biggest stories coming out of Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics’ annual meeting in Boston this weekend focuses on the success of Edwards Lifesciences Corp.’s freshly FDA-approved Pascal Precision transcatheter valve repair system in the CLASP IID trial, which compared it to Abbott Laboratories’ Mitraclip device in patients with degenerative mitral regurgitation (DMR) who were determined to be at prohibitive surgical risk.
While no one can tell the future, a panel of autoantibodies developed by researchers at New York University Grossman School of Medicine and Perlmutter Cancer Center may give physicians a much better idea about how a patient will respond to immunotherapy. That could help improve therapy selection by accurately predicting whether a patient’s cancer will recur following immunotherapy or they will experience autoimmune side effects as a result of treatment, a study published in Clinical Cancer Research on Sept. 15 found.
Challenges scheduling time for a mammogram, frustration waiting for the exam itself and pain from the test have caused any number of women to cry. Namida Lab Inc. may take the inconvenience and anxiety out of breast health assessment with its Auria test, but the tears will stay. Like a growing number of assays, the test uses tear-based analytics to determine cancer risk.
Sometimes it is a good idea to go to the dark side, particularly for individuals with undiagnosed vision impairment. Dark adaptation is one of the first aspects of vision to become impaired by age-related macular degeneration (AMD), so identifying it at early stages can preserve sight. Heru Inc. recently launched a new modality for its wearable screening platform to quickly assess dark adaptation.
Despite wide availability and coverage for colonoscopy, many patients diagnosed with colorectal cancer (CRC) have never undergone the recommended screening procedure for the malignancy and its precursors. As a result, the cancer has already spread in the majority of cases at the time of diagnosis. CRC remains the third most common cancer diagnosed in the U.S. and the second leading cause of cancer death for both men and women.
Guardant Health Inc. expanded its cancer testing to include one that provides multi-dimensional insights into tumor profiles and microenvironment that can be used to guide therapy selection. The liquid biopsy, Guardantinfinity, combines analysis of more than 800 genes with exome-wide methylation detection.
Some of the most exciting news out of the European Society for Medical Oncology Congress 2022 in Paris surrounded the rapidly evolving field of multi-cancer early detection (MCED), which offers the dual benefits of identifying malignancies at a more easily treated local stage and enabling screening for the 70% of cancers that lack recommended screening tests.
