Neurovascular Market's Time Has Come: Stealthy Sequent Medical Unveils Strategy

The neurovascular device market has been a long time in the making. Stroke is a large medically important disease; there are 795,000 strokes in the US alone each year, and its consequences are devastating to both patients and health care systems. For medical device companies, it also represents an important, largely unpenetrated market, and for too long it has remained tantalizing in the classic sense of the term; it was promising, yet just out of reach. Many companies have tried, without success, to introduce interventional devices into the stroke market. The recent setback for Wingspan, an intracranial stent (developed by Boston Scientific Corp., and now owned by StrykerCorp.) underscores the difficulties in this space. In early September, the SAMMPRIS trial (Stenting vs. Aggressive Medical Management for Preventing Recurrent Stroke for Intracranial Stenosis) was halted early when it became clear that the stented group had more than twice the rate of recurrent stroke than the patients on medical therapy.

Companies looking to develop device-based stroke therapies have traditionally been stymied by the dynamics of the disease – stroke must...