The Food and Drug Administration announced June 5 the approval of an expanded indication for the Sapien 3 Transcatheter Heart Valve (THV) for patients with symptomatic heart disease caused by failure of a previously placed bioprosthetic aortic or mitral valve who have a risk of death or severe complications from repeat surgery.
This is the first FDA approval for the expanded use of the Sapien 3 THV as a valve-in-valve treatment. Such procedures provide an alternative to repeat surgery.
The FDA evaluated data from the Transcatheter Valve Therapy Registry and found the outcome data used to support the marketing application consisted of 314 patients who had undergone aortic valve-in-valve procedures and 311 patients who had undergone mitral valve-in-valve procedures. Data showed that more than 85% of patients who underwent aortic or mitral valve-in-valve procedures experienced improvement in their heart failure symptoms 30 days after the procedure. In both aortic and mitral valve-in-valve patients, the mortality rates were substantially lower than the expected mortality rate for repeat surgery.
“For the first time, a regulatory agency is approving a transcatheter heart valve as a valve-in-valve treatment when bioprosthetic mitral or aortic valves fail in patients who are at high or greater risk of complications from repeat surgery,” Bram Zuckerman, MD, director of the division of cardiovascular devices at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a press release. “This new approval offers U.S. patients with failing surgical bioprosthetic aortic or mitral valves a less-invasive treatment option.”
Originally, the FDA approved the Sapien 3 THV for transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) as an alternative to surgical aortic valve replacement for patients with native aortic stenosis whose risk for death or severe complications from surgery is high or greater. Then in 2016, the FDA expanded the TAVR indication for Sapien 3 THV to include patients who are at intermediate surgical risk for death or complications.
Read the full press release on the FDA’s website .
