Magenta Medical is seeing green. The developer of a miniaturized heart pump designed to temporarily take some of the workload off the cardiac muscle, has collected $55 million in venture capital funding.
The round was led by OrbiMed with additional backing from New Enterprise Associates, Pitango VC and Alive Israel HealthTech Fund. The proceeds are slated for further clinical development with the goal of securing a U.S. approval, according to the company.
Magenta’s supportive approach previously received a breakthrough designation from the FDA for use during percutaneous coronary intervention procedures among high-risk patients as well as in treatments for cardiogenic shock. The company said it successfully completed a first-in-human study last year and now plans to launch a feasibility study in high-risk PCI in the near future.
The Elevate device folds up and is threaded through the blood vessels before it is expanded and deployed within the heart’s left ventricle. Once there, it can help pump blood out to the rest of the body at adjustable speeds that can reach more than five liters per minute on average, or about the same cardiac output as an adult. This allows the heart muscle to rest and recover.
Magenta describes the field of temporary mechanical circulatory support as “one of the fastest growing markets in interventional cardiology,” and it has good reason to. Abiomed, with its line of Impella transcatheter heart pumps, was the subject of the largest medtech acquisition announced in 2022, with $16.6 billion courtesy of Johnson & Johnson.
In J&J’s most recent quarterly earnings release, the company reported that the sales of its various medtech operations as a whole grew 11% to nearly $7.5 billion, excluding currency impacts—with the Abiomed acquisition alone contributing 4.6% after the deal closed last December. The conglomerate has previously projected that Abiomed’s platforms will bring in more than $1 billion per year.