Pumped Up

The testimonials are touching, but the scientific proof is wanting. How did a little medical products company get to be worth $14 billion?

- Ellie Kincaid

Lisa Cardillo, then 36, and her husband were celebrating their 15th wedding anniversary and had just checked into a bed-and-breakfast when she felt a burning, stabbing pain in her chest. She was having a heart attack.

Cardillo’s heart stopped in the emergency room when she got to the hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Within minutes, doctors used a defibrillator to restart it, but her heart was too weak to push blood to the rest of her body. They put a tiny pump, 6 inches long and shaped like a bent stick, into the left ventricle of her heart. After a few days her heart recovered, and the pump, brand name Impella, was taken out. A year later, “I feel like I’m back to 100 percent,” she says. “You would not even know what I’ve been through.”

Stories like that demonstrate how Abiomed sells five varieties of the $23,000 Impella pumps. (The price also includes care and support.) The Danvers, Massachusetts, company reported net income of $112 million on revenue of $594 million in its March 31 fiscal year, almost all of it from Impella. Michael R Minogue, Abiomed’s chief executive, tells how in 2016, when enough patients had been treated to fill Boston’s Fenway Park, a patient and his doctor threw out the first pitch at a Red Sox baseball game.

“My best day in the office is seeing patients,” says Minogue, a West Point grad with an engineering degree. “And on my worst day I pull out my book with all the patients’ stories and I read it.”