TORONTO – Puzzle Medical Devices Inc. has been granted a U.S. FDA breakthrough device designation for a transcatheter heart pump designed for fragile patients with few minimally invasive options for treating advanced heart failure.

TORONTO – Once he’d enrolled in an entrepreneurial engineering course, third-year medical school student Gabriel Georges’ task was deceptively simple: come up with a device to meet an unmet medical need. Before long, Georges had pulled two other students with engineering and investor relations smarts into the project, developing a minimally invasive, long-term transcatheter heart pump that this month garnered financing from Canadian and U.S. investors.