As cardiology departments around the world continue to emerge from Covid-19 and start to make headway on the huge backlog of procedures it has left in their wake, demand for less invasive treatment techniques enabled by threading through coronary stents and catheters on specialist guidewires is only expected to continue to grow.
Minimally invasive intervention might not be the three most exciting words within the world of cardiology and the cardiovascular system, but the procedures themselves are increasingly becoming some of the most effective, and even more so, most in-demand.
Over the course of the next three years, the wider interventional cardiology market is forecast to grow its revenues by more than 700 million dollars in its dominant North American market alone as it grows from $3.78bn in 2022 to $4.49bn by 2025, according to research by GlobalData.
This growth, which will see the market expand in the region by 5.8% in each of the next two years and a further 5.9% in the third, will be driven in large part by particularly strong demand for coronary stents as clinicians and patients alike to continue to capitalise on the benefits of it and other minimally invasive interventions.
Used in an estimated 90% of all percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) procedures, where they are delivered into the coronary artery by biocompatible guidewires, the coronary stent market is expected to grow at more than 6% a year to bring revenues to $2.43bn by 2025, according to GlobalData.
Minimally invasive interventions will continue to be more widely adopted
In addition to the 468,318 new coronary stents which that growth will produce in the US, a further 1.7m cardiac catheters will also be manufactured, distributed and used in similarly minimally invasive cardiac procedures.
That will see the cardiac catheter market grow by more than 4% in each year to reach $320.4m by 2025.
This growth for the market comes on top of consecutive decades of sustained growth in the sector with the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reporting that coronary angioplasty procedures increased by 20% in the ten years to 2011.
The US is only expected to offer further potential for growth in the years to 2025 with Fortune Business Insights predicting that such procedures will continue to be even more widely adopted across the country’s hospitals.
The report added that the strict implementation of medical reimbursement policies that is characteristic of the US healthcare system will create yet further scope for its increased adoption.
Guidewires that underpin procedures to continue growth
Standing to benefit from all this and critical to enabling the safe and infection free installation of catheters and other devices will be the development and sale of clinical coronary guidewires that will ensure their delivery.
This sector of the Interventional Cardiology Market within North America, which is inextricably linked to the development of these lifesaving procedures is expected to grow by 14.3% over the next three years to reach a total of $494.6m by 2025.
For Custom Wire Technologies (CWT), a specialist manufacturer of medical guidewires, growth over the period may be even stronger.
“We have seen an increase in catheters and guidewire development in the past three years and expect the demand to double in the next three years,” explains Jim Boldig, director of sales and engineering at Custom Wire Technology.
“CWT expects the pipeline will remain full while new players in the field begin to develop and introduce new product to the market”.
In addition to a marked growth in sales, the guidewire market is also expected to continue its shift towards the materials and treatment processes that are increasingly in demand.
According to Fortune Business Insights, this shift will result in a pronounced growth in demand for nitinol-based guidewires which it judged to be as owing to a “shift in material preference to nitinol from stainless steel”.
Demand for these specialist wires will be driven further by the fact that those that are treated and coated in order to minimise the risk of infections are expected to undergo greater growth than non-coated wires.
For those within the guidewire sector, this strengthening of demand in their products will bring the opportunity to compete for greater profits, but it will also incentivise investment and innovation to continue coming up with new and more advanced solutions.
“Many times, the tools to help in the treatment are not available or have not been developed,” explains Bob Boldig, president of Custom Wire Technologies. “This is where CWT and our capabilities come into play, as our goal is to assist in coming up with solutions.”
