Procyrion is developing the first catheter-deployed heart pump intended for long-term treatment of chronic heart failure. Thinner than a #2 pencil and only 6 cm long, Aortix™ has the potential to become a low-risk circulatory assist device for a broad range of patients. Aortix was conceived as a therapy to safely treat patients earlier in the progression of heart failure and to significantly improve their quality of life.
Heart failure accounts for 3.6 million hospitalizations, 300,000 deaths, and $35 billion in annual healthcare costs in the US alone. More than 3 million heart failure patients currently suffer from chronic fatigue and painful swelling while performing normal activities of daily living but cannot be managed by medication alone and have no safe and effective therapeutic option.
The only treatments available to these patients are heart transplants, which are limited by scarcity, and surgically implanted pumps called ventricular assist devices (VADs), which are risky, invasive, and so expensive they are only used as a last resort. This leaves more than 2 million people in the US with no choice but to suffer a slow decline in quality of life.