Yesterday medical-device giant Medtronic said it would buy Ardian, which makes an anti-hypertension device not yet approved by the FDA, for $800 million plus milestone payments.
Here’s the Dow Jones Newswires story, here’s a Daily-Start Up blog post that mentions the deal and here’s Medtronic’s press release.
You might not have thought of hypertension as a market for device-makers. But as DJN reports, Medtronic called treating uncontrolled high blood pressure via devices one of the most “exciting growth markets” for the industry. Boston Scientific has said the market could someday be as big as $5 billion.
Ardian’s system, called “renal denervation,” uses a catheter with an electrode on its tip. It is threaded from the groin into the renal artery and then to the kidney, where it zaps the renal artery wall with radio-frequency energy. That kills nerves involved with hypertension. It’s available on a limited basis outside the U.S., DJN says.
One reason researchers believe the procedure is safe is that these nerves aren?t connected in kidney transplant patients, to no apparent ill effects.? Still, the long-term effects of renal denervation aren?t fully understood. Also unknown is whether the ablated nerves will eventually grow back.
The WSJ’s Ron Winslow wrote last year about Ardian’s system, as well as another company’s approach that involves implanting a pacemaker-like device in the chest, with leads wrapped around neck arteries to affect receptors that play a role in hypertension.
As Winslow wrote then, this is all a bit of a throwback:
More than a half-century ago, doctors treating patients with uncontrolled high blood pressure might resort to crude and invasive methods such as severing nerves or zapping neck arteries with an electrical charge. Both strategies reduced blood pressure, but the procedures came with such major complications that they were reserved essentially for life-and-death situations. With the development of modern drugs, the treatments fell by the wayside.
Positive data on Ardian’s system was presented at last week’s American Heart Association meeting. (Here’s Ardian’s press release and here’s the study published in the Lancet.)
The trial that would be used as the basis for FDA approval is expected to launch in 2011, DJN says.
Photo by CarbonNYC via Flickr
