The legal troubles and withdrawal of Guidant Corp. from the endovascular abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) repair market may have cast a pall on public perception of the procedure, but competitors advancing new devices towards the market believe it just means a bigger piece of the pie for everyone else. The exit of one of the top three AAA device players (the others are Medtronic Inc. , far and away the US market leader, and Cook Group Inc. , which dominates the market in Europe) was no shock to other endovascular AAA repair companies. They've always been aware of the risks of working in a market where the degree of difficulty of the technical challenges is far closer to an extreme marathon than to a cakewalk.
Aneurysms in the abdominal aorta, a very large (normally an inch in diameter) blood vessel that leads from the heart...
