This Company Can Make Open Heart Surgeries A Thing Of The Past

Edwards Lifesciences Corp EW is working on creating surgical valves that will make open heart surgeries a thing of the past.

Michael Mussallem, Edwards Lifesciences CEO, was on CNBC Friday to discuss the company’s efforts in creating surgical heart valves.

Golden Age For Heart Valve Treatment

“I think we are in almost a golden age here,” Mussallem said. “To be able to go and do something structurally with the heart without completely opening the chest there, our eyes are open at this point. So, there are big diseases around the mitral valve, particularly when you get into this tough heart failure sort of condition that so many people suffer from, other valves in the heart, holes in the heart.”

“We can come in and probably do those things and we have got a lot of aggressive research and development going on in that regard. We actually have a cool group of employees that work on just nothing but that.”

The Market

Mussallem was asked how big the market for the aortic heart valve manufactured by the company is. He replied, “So surgical heart valve, they get about a billion dollar market. This market today around the globe probably also [has outgrown] to about a billion.”

“We speculate that by 2019 it will be more than $3 billion; analysts on the Street have it much higher than that over time. I think it’s going to take time for this to grow, it will probably be a 10-year effort before it gets fully [that] all the people that should get treated actually do,” Mussallem said.