MASSDEVICE ON CALL — Renal denervation has been among the hottest new areas for medical device research & development, but the time and money put in has yet to pay off in a big way, according to medtech analyst Joseph Gregory.
Renal denervation hogged headlines and spotlights at conferences around the world last year, but the message in 2013 is a much more sober one: the technology hasn’t taken off as quickly as the industry might have hoped.
The prevailing wisdom in 2010, when renal denervation 1st hit European markets, was that the market would be worth over $1 billion by 2020, but those projections failed to account for the significant barriers the technology faces, according to Gregory, surgical device analyst for GlobalData.
The primary hurdles for renal denervation technologies are the lack of reimbursement, the need for a novel referral pattern for getting patients from their front-line doctors to interventional cardiologists and radiologists and the lack of sufficient clinical trial data supporting long-term efficacy of the therapy. That could be bad news for industry big-dogs such as Medtronic (NYSE:MDT) and St. Jude Medical (NYSE:STJ), which have devoted significant resources to their renal denervation technologies.
"These market barriers have significantly dampened the billion-dollar market valuation projected by analysts in the first couple of years of this technology’s development," Gregory wrote in an article for GlobalData. "A more realistic global forecast predicts that this figure will be approximately $172m in 2019."
"GlobalData believes that the growth in the market will be derived primarily through current companies expanding their systems’ indication portfolios and seeking approval in emerging countries such as Brazil and Japan," Gregory added.
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