then created Procyrion to commercialize the device. In 2013, the team tested it both in large animals—swine, calves, and sheep—and human cadavers. The studies showed that the device is able to boost cardiac output by 10 percent. Now, the company plans to conduct a pilot study in humans next year, the next step in the process of getting approval from the Food & Drug Administration.
Procyrion isn’t the only company seeking to move beyond the LVAD. William Altman, CEO of medtech company CorInnova, has also seized upon the idea of “helping the heart work better.” “In heart failure, the motion of the heart becomes aberrant,” he explains. “The heart is enlarged and so the motion is floppy and poor. We have developed a device to surround the heart, to try to correct the motion of the heart to help it move correctly.”
CorInnova’s approach, which comes out of research from Texas A&M University, involves a plastic encased wire framework that surrounds the heart like a girdle. The device, called CardiacStar, contains two sets of chambers. The innermost is filled with saline to allow the device to conform to the shape of the heart. The outermost pumps air to gently squeeze the heart to increase output, Altman says. The company claims that the device can be implanted with a minimally invasive surgery.
Altman added that animal studies show that output is increased by 50 percent. He added that the device has also shown that it can aid patients with diastolic heart failure, which is where the heart fails to fill. CorInnova, which was founded in 2005 in Houston, has raised about $2 million in grants and angel funding, and plans a Series A equity round of as much as $6 million next year to fund a human trial.
The approaches taken by both Procyrion and CorInnova make sense, given the limitations of LVADs, says Rick Anderson, managing director at PTV Sciences, a healthcare venture capital firm in Austin. Given that heart failure is the single most expensive condition requiring hospitalization—adding up to $32 billion a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control—cardiologists are keen for new tools to treat patients.
“There’s a really big unmet need, and advancement in technology seems to be accelerating,” Anderson says. “You have to try to keep these patients healthy enough to keep them out of the system.”
The potential market for both new devices is enormous. One in five adults over the age of 40 will develop heart failure, which reduces the organ’s ability to push out blood throughout the circulatory system. That in turn,
