Abbott Announces US and European Approvals for New Technologies to Support Effective Treatment for Abnormal Heart Rhythms

Abbott has announced two approvals as part of its growing suite of electrophysiology products in the global market, as the company’s TactiFlex™ Ablation Catheter, Sensor Enabled™, the world’s only ablation catheter with a flexible tip and contact force sensing, received CE Mark for treating people with abnormal heart rhythms like atrial fibrillation (AFib). Abbott’s FlexAbility™ Ablation Catheter, Sensor Enabled™ also recently secured an expanded indication for treating patients with a complex heart condition by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Abbott received CE Mark of the TactiFlex™ Ablation Catheter, Sensor Enabled™ (SE), the world’s first ablation catheter designed with a unique flexible tip and contact force sensing, proven to reduce procedure times and patients’ exposure to radiation compared to standard power ablation. When integrated with the EnSite™ X EP System, the Abbott system which allows physicians to accurately identify areas in the heart that require an ablation treatment, the TactiFlex catheter can deliver high-power while more easily adapting to the heart tissue compared to conventional catheters. The TactiFlex catheter can also result in reduced procedure times when compared to the company’s previous generation catheters. The European launch of TactiFlex is the latest within Abbott’s portfolio of electrophysiology solutions designed to better treat arrhythmias – especially around AFib, the most common arrhythmia that is a growing epidemic affecting 37 million people worldwide6. Initial cases leveraging TactiFlex occurred in the United Kingdom and Germany.

“When we treat complex ablation cases for people battling arrhythmias, we want to eliminate the arrhythmia and get our patients back to living their lives,” said Isabel Deisenhofer, M.D., professor, head of the department of Electrophysiology at the German Heart Centre Munich in Germany. “The TactiFlex catheter’s data around using high-power during ablation will be game-changing for patients. When you combine these tools with Abbott’s EnSite X EP System, the innovation is truly opening new doors in patient care.”

Millions of Europeans are affected by cardiac arrhythmias, caused by breakdowns in the electrical pathways of the heart that can lead to erratic heartbeats or cause the heart to beat too fast or too slow. AFib is a condition in which the heart’s chambers are out of sync, causing them to beat in a rapid fashion. If left untreated, AFib may eventually lead to heart failure or stroke. Physicians can perform an ablation to treat arrhythmias, in which long flexible tools—called catheters—are inserted into the heart to study and treat the arrhythmia. The catheters deliver radiofrequency (RF) energy to disrupt the tissue in the heart responsible for creating the abnormal heart rhythm.

The company also received FDA approval for an expanded indication of its FlexAbility Ablation Catheter™, Sensor Enabled™ (SE), a flexible tip catheter that helps physicians identify abnormal signals and apply therapy to treat a complex heart condition known as ventricular tachycardia (VT) in patients with non-ischemic cardiomyopathy (NICM). NICM is a type of heart muscle disease that prevents the heart from pumping blood effectively. This is associated with VT, a fast heart rhythm that can lead to cardiac arrest if untreated. Procedures to treat these patients are considered complex due to the nature of the disease itself and the need to treat both inside and outside surfaces of the heart.