In the past five years, China's ventricular assist technology (i.e., "artificial heart") has developed rapidly, and three domestic implantable ventricular assist devices (LVADs) have been approved and marketed by the State Drug Administration, and another one is in the marketing declaration stage. The number of LVAD implantations has increased yearly, with a total of 363 LVAD implantations performed in 70 hospitals, a rapid increase.
CoretechMed (Chinese: 核心医疗), an "artificial heart" company, has raised nearly RMB 200 million in Series C+ financing, led by Zhengxin Valley Capital and followed by Jinglin Investment. This is another capital raise for CoretechMed, just three months after it completed its Series C funding round of hundreds of millions of RMB in December 2022.
CoretechMed, founded in 2016, is a company that lays out both implantable and interventional artificial heart products, and its self-developed new generation of ultra-compact fully magnetically levitated artificial heart - Corheart 6, is currently the world's smallest and lightest implantable left ventricular assist device. Corheart 6 is the world's smallest and lightest implantable left ventricular assist device and is purely "Chinese" from development to production. From January to October 2022, 50 patients were enrolled in Corheart 6 and followed up with excellent results. The results showed that the patient's cardiac function improved significantly 3 months after the procedure.
According to the team, Corheart 6 has several advantages over similar products in the market: first, it is miniaturized and portable, with good blood compatibility, representing the global development direction of implantable artificial heart technology; second, the core process of the industry chain is completely self-research and domestic, with controllable costs; finally, the incidence of clinical adverse events is low, "from the current clinical trial results The incidence of cardiac arrhythmia, right heart failure and other common adverse events in the use of left heart assist devices are also lower than the industry level".
And heart failure is the last battlefield of cardiovascular disease, a single product can not meet the needs of different patients. In response to the actual clinical needs of over 10 million heart failure patients in China, CoretechMed has realized a multi-product pipeline layout in the field of the interventional artificial heart (pVAD, interventional ventricular assist device) to provide a full range of treatment solutions to meet the short- and medium-term circulatory failure for clinical high-risk patients with different flow requirements and different support time needs.
In this regard, CoretechMed's interventional artificial heart products based on core technologies such as self-designed miniature motors, highly reliable bearing design, and software control have achieved stable operation for more than 60 days and billions of cycles, and the reliability and safety of the products have been fully verified, especially in terms of blood compatibility, the hemolysis index MIH is 70% lower than that of international benchmark products, which is less destructive to blood, and the product performance has significant advantages.
Core Medical's competitors include Microport (Chinese: 微创科威), BeiboMed (Chinese: 北博医疗) and Tjwelcom (Chinese: 天津汇康).