St. Jude Medical Purchases Swiss Endosense

St. Jude Medical (SJM; St. Paul, MN, USA) has announced the acquisition of Endosense (Geneva, Switzerland), adding ablation catheters with contact-force measurement to its atrial fibrillation (AF) portfolio.

The agreement includes an up-front payment of USD 170 million and a further USD 161 million if the Endosense TactiCath ablation catheter—a device that gives physicians real-time readings of how much pressure they're applying to the heart wall during ablation—meets certain US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory milestones. The device is already CE marked to treat AF and supraventricular tachycardia, and will be submitted for FDA approval for paroxysmal AF by the end of 2013.

The acquisition of Endosense is highly complementary to the SJM business, providing a strong, patent-protected platform for future product development. Immediate opportunities to integrate the technology into other proprietary SJM technologies include the potential to offer a MediGuide-enabled force-sensing ablation catheter and to incorporate force-sensing data into the company's EnSite Velocity Mapping System. In addition, St. Jude Medical's global presence and geographic distribution scale can further strengthen and enhance Endosense's international growth in a number of markets.

"The acquisition of Endosense further strengthens our industry-leading portfolio of products to treat patients with cardiac arrhythmias, and provides an opportunity to accelerate our market share capture in the USD 900 million global cardiac ablation catheter market," said Frank J. Callaghan, president of the cardiovascular and ablation technologies division of SJM. "This transaction significantly accelerates our timeline to providing an irrigated ablation catheter that incorporates force sensing in both international and US markets, and has potential future applications across other St. Jude Medical technology platforms as well.”

“TactiCath offers important improvements over previous-generation ablation catheters,” said Professor Karl-Heinz Kuck, MD, director of cardiology at St. Georg Hospital (Hamburg, Germany). “While low contact force can lead to ineffective lesions, excessive contact force can cause safety concerns. The ability to more precisely measure this force improves procedural efficiency and provides increased confidence that an ablation will be effective in treating complex cardiac arrhythmias.”

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