Deep inside the left side of the heart sits a small, irregular sac called the left atrial appendage. In patients with atrial fibrillation - an irregular heartbeat that affects millions - blood can pool and clot there. When a clot escapes, it can travel to the brain and cause a stroke. For decades, the standard defense was lifelong blood thinners. But many patients cannot tolerate them.
Conformal Medical, founded in Nashua, New Hampshire in 2016, built its company around a different defense: physically sealing the appendage shut. That approach, called left atrial appendage occlusion, or LAAO, already exists on the market. Conformal's wager was that the existing devices were harder to place, harder to size, and harder to scale than they needed to be.
Its answer is the CLAAS AcuFORM System. At its core is a proprietary conformable foam matrix - a material that molds itself to the varied, unpredictable shapes of each patient's appendage. Where competing implants come in as many as six rigid sizes, Conformal's design covers a broad anatomic range with just two.
That single design choice ripples outward. Simpler sizing means a simpler procedure. Conformal's stated goal is to turn LAAO into a same-day, single-operator intervention that can be guided by intracardiac echocardiography under local anesthesia - potentially avoiding the general anesthesia and transesophageal echocardiography that many procedures rely on today.
