Pacertool: Can a Biomarker From a Medical Device Boost the Efficacy of CRT?

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ARTICLE SUMMARY:

After almost three decades of use, clinicians still lack the tools to definitively answer fundamental questions related to cardiac resynchronization therapy and the lack of treatment effect in a large number of patients, which has resulted in the underutilization of these devices. To give clinicians the information they need to select patients appropriately and to optimize therapy, Pacertool is advancing a device that enables the measurement of a biomarker for dyssynchronous heart failure.

Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) is a miraculous treatment for certain heart failure patients. Clinicians operating in the cath lab have seen the heart function of patients on the table improve immediately upon implantation of a biventricular pacemaker, but even more astonishing is the clinical effect seen as early as three months, when many patients experience a substantial improvement in heart function due to reverse modeling.

Several large clinical trials have demonstrated that implantable CRT pacemakers markedly improve patients’ lives on several fronts, by reducing heart failure symptoms and hospitalizations, inducing favorable remodeling of the heart, and increasing survival. But that’s only part of the story.

The data from these same large trials also suggests that 30-40% of patients selected for CRT therapy according to eligibility guidelines don’t respond to it. While that CRT non-response rate is often cited in the literature, Jon H. Hoem, CEO of the medical device company Pacertool (Oslo, Norway), says he was recently surprised that so many thought-leading physicians agreed (in a rigorously conducted market survey) that the experience of their own institutions confirms that high non-response rate.

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