Phillips Medisize Weighs in on the Cardiotech and PFA Markets

Atrial fibrillation (AFib) is an irregular, often very rapid heart rhythm. During AFib, the heart’s atria beat out of sync with its ventricles. Because not enough blood is pumped out of the atria, blood pools in the area, which can clot. The condition increases the risk of stroke, heart failure, and other cardiac complications.

A common treatment for AFib is ablation, which uses small burns or freezes heart cells to cause some scarring on the inside of the heart. This helps to break up or insulate the electrical signals that cause irregular heartbeats, helping the heart maintain a normal rhythm.

Radiofrequency ablation (RFA) leverages RF energy to burn the cardiac tissue. However, complications can arise from unintentional thermal injury of the esophagus during RFA, causing esophageal ulcers and, rarely, atrioesophageal fistulas.

Due to the growing prevalence of AFib around the globe, physicians seek innovative methods to improve the efficiency of ablation procedures and provide better treatment outcomes for people with the disease.

In order to gather more information about cardiovascular technology and the burgeoning pulsed field ablation market, MPO spoke to Pete Soupir, VP and Segment Lead, MedTech at Phillips Medisize, a Molex company.

Sam Brusco: What requests are most popular lately from your cardiovascular device manufacturer partners?

Phillips Medisize is seeing requests from the cardiovascular market for diagnostic, therapeutic, and monitoring devices such as electrophysiology catheters, cardiac defibrillators, and cardiac monitors. We remain focused on developing effective, reliable, and modular interconnect and fiber solutions, as well as offering product development capabilities. Customers are seeking our world-class electronics, contract design and development leadership, and scalable global manufacturing capabilities to support their needs. With our team of more than 450 engineers, we help them develop and produce cardiovascular devices that improve patient outcomes.

We are also seeing an increase in requests for pulsed field ablation (PFA) technologies. With many companies having accelerated timelines to develop their products and solutions in this space, they’re looking to work with experts like us to solve unique challenges and achieve their desired time to market. We collaborate with customers using multidisciplined engineering and development teams. This is critical for the development of connectors and cables, as well as fiber sensors.

Brusco: Does Phillips Medisize support the electrophysiology (EP) catheter market, specifically pulsed field ablation (PFA) technology?

Phillips Medisize has a wealth of experience working within the EP catheter market and the PFA space. The emergence of PFA has led to an increased demand for our services, particularly because of our expertise in complex interconnect assemblies, custom connectors, fiber optics, and fine wire termination. In just the past year, we have helped our customers support surgeons who performed more than five million cardiovascular surgeries.

Brusco: How has the recent boom of approved PFA technologies impacted your business?

The advantage of being a highly experienced contract design and manufacturing organization (CDMO) with a broad set of capabilities, resources, and scale is that we can easily respond to an uptick in demand, shifting people and resources across both design and manufacturing. That flexibility has served us well with the recent significant increase in customer demand to support the design and rapid commercialization of their PFA technologies. Our customers find that engaging us early and often, long before they are brought to market, benefits our customers and ultimately the electrophysiologists and patients they serve.

For PFA, another reason we have seen high demand, and have been able to differentiate our offering, relates to the emphasis on interconnect solutions due to the need for higher pin count densities. As the capabilities of catheters continue to advance, selecting the correct interconnect partner early in the process is essential to achieve the best time-to-market and total cost of ownership outcomes due to increased connector requirements (signal density, small mechanical envelope, and high voltage).

Brusco: Anything else you want to add about the cardiotech market?

Remote patient monitoring has been a growing trend for more than a decade, but in the past few years, advancements in technology (e.g., battery life, more sophisticated connectivity, and app development) combined with payers’ willingness to cover these services has rapidly amplified the demands and needs in this space. Phillips Medisize has developed and manufactured many different patient monitoring solutions, from traditional cardiac monitors to high-tech, discreet options such as skin patches, all of which have helped provide the necessary health information for physicians and caretakers, improving the lives of patients in meaningful ways.

For more in-depth coverage of recent developments in the pulsed field ablation market, read the November issue feature article: Bring the Beat Back: Examining Pulsed Field Ablation