CardiacAssist Builds a Bridge to the Next Bridge

The road to heart failure is on a steady decline. Patients get progressively worse as time goes by and that means they need different therapeutic options depending on where they are in their journey. Today’s treatments for chronic heart failure leave large gaps in the continuum of care; drugs are used at the early stages, and at the end stage a heart transplantation is the only option. In between the extremes, says Michael Garippa, CEO of CardiacAssist Inc., there is a need for technologies to support the failing hearts of patients "for hours, days, weeks, and years; cardiac assist devices to reverse multi-organ failure, to help the heart recover, or at the very least, keep patients alive so they can move on to the next therapeutic option," he says.

CardiacAssist aims to fill those gaps. Its goal is to create a bridge to a decision or a bridge to another bridge, with TandemHeart a percutaneous centrifugal pump for the...