Growth in the first quarter for Boston Scientific Corp.’s blockbuster products, Farapulse and Watchman, pushed the company well over analysts’ expectations and gave management confidence to raise its guidance for the year to 15% to 17% up from 12.4% to 14.5%, despite a projected $200 million in tariff impacts.

The American Medical Association’s CPT editorial panel will meet May 1-3 to consider codes for several devices and services, but the most important of these might be the code for cardiac contractility modulation.

Receipt of EU MDR CE mark may not be a magic potion, but Elixir Medical Corp. is certainly feeling a boost from the regulatory nod for its mechanical Lithix hertz contact intravascular lithotripsy system for treatment of moderate to severely calcified coronary artery lesions. Simultaneously, the company reported the launch of Lithix and completion of first cases in Italy, France and Germany.

The new technology add-on payment for the TAG thoracic branch endoprosthesis is likely coming to an end, but the device’s manufacturer, Gore Medical Inc., petitioned CMS to reassign the procedure to a new diagnostic-related group that would more accurately reflect the costs of the related procedure.

Boston Scientific Corp.’s up to $664 million acquisition of Bolt Medical Inc. closed just days after Bolt secured U.S. FDA 520(k) clearance for its intravascular lithotripsy (IVL) system, positioning Boston Sci to challenge Johnson & Johnson’s Shockwave IVL system, which has been the only player in the market.

In the wake of the pandemic, many leading med-tech companies took steps to on-shore and near-shore manufacturing, a move that could protect significant numbers of players from the worst of the effects of the tariffs announced by the Trump administration last week.

Pulsed field ablation using Boston Scientific Corp.’s Farapulse system was non-inferior and even superior, slightly, to Medtronic plc’s Artic Front Advance cardiac cryoablation system in treating patients with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation.

The Trump administration’s declaration of a new round of tariffs did not sit well with trade associations, but the impact of those tariffs may vary somewhat by company. Analysts said the lack of clarity regarding the impact of tariffs makes it difficult to predict the impact on the device and diagnostics industries, leaving investors and customers alike with a large overhang of uncertainty.

Counterintuitively, use of cerebral embolic protection failed to reduce the incidence of stroke in the 72 hours following a transcatheter aortic valve replacement or implantation found a late-breaking clinical trial presented at ACC.25, the American College of Cardiology’s annual scientific session held March 29-31 in Chicago and simultaneously published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Abbott Laboratories snagged a CE mark for its Volt pulsed field ablation catheter for atrial fibrillation several months earlier than the mid-year approval expected. The Abbott Park, Ill.-based company has begun Volt’s commercial launch with the physicians who participated in its European clinical trials and plans to expand to other users on the continent in the second half of 2025.