Patients diagnosed with congestive heart failure (CHF) face grim prospects. The disease will inevitably progress until the day when the heart can't pump enough blood to meet the body's metabolic needs. In early stages, the disease can be managed with pharmacologic therapies designed to reduce some of the load on the heart or to boost its pumping action, but these do nothing to halt the inexorable progression of CHF. If CHF patients live long enough—and most of them die within ten to twelve years—they ultimately become candidates for heart transplantation, entering a lottery with very poor odds. There are only 2,400 donor hearts available in the US each year for transplantation, but there are 5 million sufferers of CHF, with 1.4 million in the most advanced two stages of the diseases (according to a classification system developed by the New York Heart Association, which groups patients into four classes according to functional levels based on the severity of their disease). The lucky recipients of donor hearts are not out of the woods either; there is always a serious risk of rejection, or infection that cannot be successfully fought off in the presence of immunosuppressive drugs.
With no good therapeutic options for CHF, a huge untapped market has attracted device developers and venture capitalists to designing...
