a mini-thoracotomy. The pump is placed near the heart in a pocket similar to a pacemaker holder and connected to the left atrium. It then pumps up to 4.25 liters of blood per minute—often doubling the pumping capacity of a damaged heart, Southworth says. “We give the heart a rest. We supplement that which it’s unable to do itself.” The pump is connected to a power pack that patients wear around their waists.
So far, 45 patients in Europe have received the Synergy device. One of those patients, who had the pump implanted over 2 years ago, feels so good he took himself off the heart-transplant list, says Southworth, a medical-device veteran whose previous experience includes stints at Boston Scientific, C.R. Bard, and Datascope.
CircuLite is working on deploying Synergy in other diseases that compromise heart performance. In addition to developing a device for pulmonary arterial hypertension, the company has funding from the National Institutes of Health to make a pediatric version of Synergy for children awaiting heart transplants. The company could receive as much as $3.7 million in funding from the NIH for that project. CircuLite is also working on an “endovascular” version of Synergy—a device designed to be simple enough to be implanted by cardiologists in a non-surgical procedure.
CircuLite’s latest venture round was led by founding investor Forbion Capital Partners, which is based in the Netherlands, and by one new investor, New York-based MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings. “The revolution is in being able to offer such circulatory support in a minimally invasive way,” says Avi Molcho, a venture partner at Forbion, in an e-mail. Forbion helped found CircuLite, Molcho says, largely because of the potential size of the market: Just 300,000 patients in the U.S. can benefit from ventricular assist devices, compared to 1 million who might benefit from Synergy, he estimates. Molcho predicts CircuLite could become an attractive takeover candidate for companies looking for new growth opportunities. “We are already seeing a strong interest of large medical device players,” he says.
Because CircuLite is creating a new market, Southworth says it’s difficult to put an exact dollar value on the opportunity. But he has spent quite a bit of time talking to Wall Street analysts, who have assured him that the worth of the total market “has a ‘b’ in it, not an ‘m,'” he says.
Ultimately, Southworth says, CircuLite’s goal is to turn back the clock for heart failure patients by giving their hearts the rest they need in order to heal. “This is a disruptive solution in the heart failure continuum,” he says. “We feel confident we’ll be able to stop the progression of heart failure.”
