Abbott Laboratories has kicked off a pivotal study to evaluate its catheter-based Triclip transcatheter tricuspid valve repair system in patients with severe tricuspid regurgitation (TR). The first enrollments in the U.S. FDA-approved Triluminate study were performed at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis by a cardiac team led by Paul Sorajja, director of the Center for Valve and Structural Heart Disease at the Minneapolis Heart Institute and co-primary investigator for the trial.

A little less than a year after it reported the final close of a series D financing, Miracor Medical SA, of Awans, Belgium, has been granted breakthrough device designation by the U.S. FDA for its Pressure-Controlled Intermittent Coronary Sinus Occlusion (PICSO) Impulse System for the treatment of ST-elevated myocardial infarction (STEMI) patients.

A fast response with cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for cardiac arrest victims can save their lives, but older adults often are alone in their home or a bedroom when symptoms strike. Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) have developed a machine learning-based system that listens to ambient audio via dedicated smart speakers or smartphones for agonal breathing, the distinctive sound that a person in cardiac arrest makes.

You have to hand it to the cancer lobby. It really has the U.S. federal government wrapped around its little finger. Some will say I'm overstating the case, but is that really a solid argument? Let's examine the evidence. Mortality, economic impact boxes? Not checked First, let's look at overall mortality in the U.S. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, heart disease was responsible for more than 614,000 deaths in 2013, while the various cancers claimed fewer than 592,000 lives. If you add cerebrovascular deaths (more than 133,000) into the...

Johnson & Johnson’s year did not get off to a great start. Not that last year was any better. I mean the company report lagging sales in its medical device’s market. But the start of 2016, led off with the Brunswick-N.J.-based company reporting that it would lay off about 3,000 people from its medical device division. Or about 6 percent of all medical device jobs and about 2.5 percent of J&J’s global workforce - for those of you that dig percents instead of raw numbers. Most of the layoffs would come from the orthopedics, surgery and cardiovascular segments and result...

  The mood was pretty somber going into Heartware’s (Framingham, Mass.) breakout session during the 34th annual J.P.Morgan Healthcare conference. But why wouldn’t it be? It’s not everyday that a med-tech CEO has to discuss halting a European trial on one of its most promising technologies. But that’s exactly what Doug Godshall, Heartware president/CEO did. Godshall, who took the leadership position of Heartware in 2006, delivered the bad news across a sea of somewhat disenchanted faces during the conference. He did a great job, but honestly, is there ever a “good way” to deliver bad news? You see, Godshall revealed...

This week in med-tech history:  Nine years ago this week the biggest news in Medical Device Daily was Guidant’s recall of nearly 50,000 implantable defibrillators, coupled with the company’s failure to alert customers of the danger of one of the devices for nearly three years after it was aware of a problem. On June 21, 2005 MDD reported that the Guidant recall created a serious issue for Johnson & Johnson, which at that time was planning to buy Guidant for $25.4 billion. But of course when we fast forward a bit to January 2006, we know that deal never went...

America is the fattest country in the world. The obesity epidemic is one of the largest problems facing the healthcare system, both from a clinical and an economic perspective. Pardon the pun. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than one-third of U.S. adults (35.7%) are obese. Because obesity is associated with so many other health problems, such as heart disease and diabetes, the topic has drawn a great deal of attention at industry gatherings, including the Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit last month where the clinical focus was on obesity, diabetes, and the metabolic crisis. But...

Sooner or later, we’ll all know someone who has lost his or her life to heart disease, and today, Sept. 10, 2012, is the 20th anniversary of my father’s passing. George Edward McCarty had undergone a triple bypass several years earlier, but restenosis of the coronary arteries and an otherwise failing heart would be his undoing. The world of medical technology has changed enormously since Dad died, so much so that what we now take for granted might have seemed miraculous in 1992. Would Dad have lived another 20 years had his predicament arisen 20 years later in medical history?...