As Boston Scientific’s pulsed field ablation business continues to grow, the medtech aims to nourish the program with the acquisition of an atrial fibrillation-focused startup.
The company has signed a deal to buy Cortex, which made its debut in late 2023, and its mapping system for identifying the electrical misfires that cause afib’s irregular heartbeats. The financial terms of the deal, expected to close in early 2025, were not made public.
Cortex’s FDA-cleared OptiMap system includes a basket-shaped catheter designed to fill the heart’s chambers with 64 electrodes, plus algorithms that help provide clinicians with a real-time view of action potentials as they flow across the cardiac muscle.
“We believe the addition of the Cortex technology complements our electrophysiology portfolio with a differentiated cardiac mapping offering to assist with complex AF cases,” Boston Scientific’s global president of electrophysiology, Nick Spadea-Anello, said in a statement.
Cortex was born out of the Ajax Health startup incubator, and last December gathered $90 million in funding commitments from KKR, Hellman & Friedman and Access Industries’ AI Life Sciences, among others.
Led by Ajax CEO Duke Rohlen, Cortex set out to build an integrated pulsed field ablation treatment platform—and was able to tap into the work of another Ajax portfolio company, Ablacon, which had focused on heart mapping.
A previous Ablacon randomized study showed the system now known as OptiMap was able to help guide clinicians in successfully tamping down cases of persistent afib, increasing the proportion of patients free from the arrhythmia by 51 percentage points after one year compared to pulmonary vein isolation alone.
Boston Scientific’s own pulsed field ablation platform, Farapulse, so far only has a green light from the FDA to treat paroxysmal, or intermittent, cases of afib. However, that’s been enough to see sales in the company’s electrophysiology division grow by 177% last quarter, year-over-year. Boston Scientific also recently obtained the FDA’s blessing for its updated Farapulse Nav catheter, equipped with magnetic navigation, and its Faraview mapping software.
Meanwhile, Cortex previously announced this year that it launched a 300-patient, single-arm clinical trial of its approach in both paroxysmal and persistent afib, including patients receiving their first ablation treatment or a redo procedure, with the goal of targeting arrhythmia sources outside of the pulmonary vein.
“The OptiMap System has demonstrated it can help physicians devise a targeted ablation strategy for complex cases, which can lead to improved procedural efficiency and outcomes in patients with challenging atrial arrhythmias,” Spadea-Anello said. “We look forward to advancing this technology and driving future clinical evidence generation with the goal of making it accessible to physicians and patients globally in the years ahead.”