Myocor Closes After Selling Assets

Myocor Inc., a Maple Grove, MN-based startup that has spent years developing a medical device to treat heart-valve problems, is shutting down after selling its intellectual property to California-based Edwards Lifesciences.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Edwards, which manufactures heart valves, will not continue trials of Myocor’s experimental devices, which were meant to help reshape the heart so that patients’ mitral valves could close more effectively.

The devices, in turn, were intended to help stop or reverse a heart enlargement process that is part of heart failure and impairs the function of the left ventricle — the heart’s key pumping chamber.

“It is disappointing,” said Dr. Wes Pedersen, a cardiologist at the Minneapolis Heart Institute, who implanted Myocor devices in two patients this year. “I just hope that this technology in some way, shape or form is going to be resurrected again.”

Founded in 1996, Myocor has been funded with about $60 million in venture capital over the years.

While Jim Hickey, Myocor’s president, could not be reached for comment, C.J. Schweich, one of the company’s founders and its chief technology officer, confirmed the closure of the business.

With no products approved for use in the United States, Myocor underwent a reorganization earlier this year that dropped employment to 20 from 28, as of July.

Pedersen, the cardiologist who was participating in a trial for one of Myocor’s devices, said the company’s failure was unusual because it came so late in the game. Whereas some startups fail while trying to demonstrate the feasibility of a device, Pedersen said, Myocor was well beyond that stage, enrolling more than 100 patients in a pivotal trial that could have formed the basis for regulatory approval of its device.

But it was taking too long to complete the study, Pedersen said, because the company struggled to recruit patients who met the criteria for the clinical trial.

“I thought it was a great concept,” he said of Myocor’s devices. “Unfortunately, they just ran out of money.”