next fall will be to 90 cents, page-8

re: patent fight and competition. Well that's nice if you think it has a market edge but you have to remember that the market is already crowded with devices and methods of dealing with keeping people alive for transplants. The medical profession faces a big query over this product if someone is waiting for a transplant and then has to, in a sick state, undergo a 5/8hr operation for a VCR.

They have been using ventricle assist devices a long time and more than 10000 have been done across the planet and sucessfully including St Vincent's.


With the recent implicit admission of little long term hope in the switch from destination therapy for a big market device manufacturers are looking at the short term solutions.

Your claim of market niche is really quite flawed when you consider that others are well ahead of VCR including the already CE registered Berlin Heart's Incor which is sold in Europe and has been successfully implanted in a child in the USA.

Add to this Thoratec, Novacor, World Heart and especially the still impressive Jarvik 200 and the emerging Abiocor and the other Abiomed's products and VCR is a virtual one product Mr In Between. It may be a fair pump among many which are ahead behind or level with it and have market and geographical and funding advantages.

VCR is the first of the new companies but very bogged down in trials and with a high death rate for whatever reasons that will dog it wherever it goes.

Above all that I nurse a personal layman's reservation about non pulsatile devices and I do not like this company's doctrine of convenience that allows it to hype implants and withhold news of death.

It still has not even admitted the poor guy died a few days after an implant at St Vincent's. I wonder if the Sunday papers and the current affairs TV people were contacted by the PR machine to cover that.

He's dead buried and forgotten. Not here for Christmas. I wonder if he had another chance if he would have had this big pump with tubes from his abdomen and wires hanging from his gut pumping into his heart.