The battle for control of a developing market for heart valves that can be inserted without open-heart surgery intensified today as Edwards Lifesciences Corp. (EW)’s second-generation product was found to outperform Medtronic Inc.’s device in a head-to-head comparison. The artificial valves are inserted using a catheter threaded into the heart through an artery. A day after it was reported that Medtronic’s CoreValve had a better mortality rate than open-heart surgery, other researchers said the newest form of Edwards’ device, the Sapien XT, had about the same death rate as CoreValve and was easier to insert.
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