Ep 73 - The Complete History of the Sapien TAVR – from PVT’s Emerging Idea to Edwards Lifesciences' Success

Edward Lifesciences’ acquisition of Percutaneous Valve Technologies helped mark the birth of one of medtech’s great game-changers – the development of the transcatheter aortic valve replacement. In this week’s episode, Stanton Rowe, the former CEO of PVT, will walk us through the early days of TAVR, including the enormous doubt the start-up faced as it developed the technology. He also explained how Edwards came to acquire the start-up, which had strong interest from Medtronic, Boston Scientific, and others. Rowe, who is now CEO of the NXT Biomedical incubator, also offers some provocative thoughts on the origins of medtech innovation (and explains why he misses medical device conferences.) Larry Wood, corporate vice president at Edwards Lifesciences, will explain why Edwards opted to pursue PVT rather than continue to develop its own TAVR technology. He also explains why the clinical trial testing of the valve now known as Sapien was so difficult and how he rewrote the compensation packages for his TAVR sales team to help build confidence in the new technology. Scan the QR code for more information about our upcoming DeviceTalks Tuesday discussion with Sagentia! You can subscribe to this podcast on most major podcast players including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Spotify.

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