What Is Available For Patients With Ultra-Advanced Or End-Stage Heart Failure?

— -- Question: What is available for patients with ultra-advanced or end-stage heart failure?

Answer: Yes, that's a very sick population. We do not have and probably we will not have anytime soon a perfect solution. We should have treated those patients before they became that sick, but sometimes it's unavoidable.

Right now, we have transplant therapy as one option, which very well-established, there are some positive results. And many centers in the United States and elsewhere perform those procedures. We have what they call VAD -- it's a ventricular assisted device -- that has been used successfully to breach these patients until they can receive their transplant. And hopefully in the near future, we're going to have more permanent devices to help the heart beat and some device that to substitute the heart, such as the artificial heart that has been recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration. So, there is some hope in the pipeline for patients with advanced heart failure. But the solution has not completely arrived yet.