ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Successful device development is rarely easy, but few blockbuster technologies have faced as many challenges – or achieved as great a success – as percutaneous heart valves. In this in-depth interview we talk with the two executives behind the percutaneous valve revolution: Stan Rowe and Stan Rabinovich, who helped found Percutaneous Valve Technologies (PVT).
Over the past five years, no technology development in cardiovascular devices has had a greater claim to the label “disruptive breakthrough” than transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR). Long considered a crazy idea by both physicians and industry, TAVR has proven disruptive in several ways, opening up life-saving therapy to a patient population often considered lost, while transitioning a procedure once considered the exclusive province of cardiac surgeons to interventional cardiologists.
