Abiomed Brand Guidelines: Danvers, the AbioCor Heart and the Impella Pump From Aachen

An artificial-heart project north of Boston.

Abiomed began in 1981 in Danvers, Massachusetts, north of Boston. English Wikipedia names its founder as David M. Lederman and gives the company’s first name as Applied Biomedical Corporation; German Wikipedia gives the same year, founder, name and town.

Its first big project was a complete artificial heart. Funded by federal research grants and working with the Texas Heart Institute, the company developed the AbioCor, which English Wikipedia describes as a grapefruit-sized electromagnetic device with an internal battery, built to replace the heart without wires or tubes passing through the skin. It was first implanted in a patient in July 2001; fourteen were implanted in clinical trials between 2001 and 2004, and in 2006 the device received FDA approval for a narrow group of patients who did not qualify for a heart transplant, according to the same article.

In 2004 Michael R. Minogue became president and chief executive. German Wikipedia says he went on to build Abiomed into a global specialist in heart pumps. A year later the company turned to Germany.

From Aachen: the Impella pump.

The Impella pump has German roots. German Wikipedia says that in the 1990s a small group around the engineer Thorsten Siess worked on blood pumps at the Helmholtz Institute for Biomedical Engineering in Aachen, with funding from the German Research Foundation. From that work came a start-up, Impella AG, in 1997; in 2000 it received the Innovationspreis der deutschen Wirtschaft, a German business innovation prize, for a first intracardiac pump system. After insolvency proceedings in 2002 it restarted with new investors as Impella CardioSystems AG.

Abiomed bought Impella CardioSystems in 2005. Both English and German Wikipedia say the purchase moved the company’s focus from replacing the heart to helping it recover, and German Wikipedia says the Aachen site became Abiomed’s European headquarters, as Abiomed Europe GmbH. The pump range kept the name of the start-up that first developed it, the same source notes. Siess later became Abiomed’s chief technology officer, English Wikipedia says.

English Wikipedia describes Impella devices as percutaneous microaxial pumps mounted on support catheters, typically inserted through the femoral artery. The range has included the Impella 2.5, the Impella CP, the Impella 5.5 and the right-heart Impella RP. The same source dates the first FDA 510(k) clearance, for the Impella 2.5, to June 2008, a premarket approval for high-risk percutaneous coronary procedures to March 2015, and a humanitarian device exemption for the Impella RP to January 2015. In 2007 the Impella 2.5 was among the products given a Medical Design Excellence Award, English Wikipedia says. By 2022 the line also included Impella Connect, a service giving hospital teams remote access to pump status data in the cloud, according to the same article.

Further purchases followed. In 2014 Abiomed bought ECP, a Berlin heart-pump developer founded in 2007, together with Aachen Innovative Solutions, which held related patents, according to German Wikipedia. In April 2020 it bought Breethe, a University of Maryland spin-out working on a portable extracorporeal membrane oxygenation system, later sold as the Abiomed Breethe OXY-1; the system received FDA 510(k) clearance later in 2020, and that year the FDA also granted emergency use authorisations covering the Impella and its use together with the Breethe system, English Wikipedia says. In June 2021 it added the catheter developer preCARDIA. Abiomed joined the S&P 500 index in May 2018, and in the same year opened an innovation centre at its Danvers headquarters with laboratories and a production line, English Wikipedia says.

Heart devices and documentation.

Cardiovascular device makers sell to a narrow audience: interventional cardiologists, electrophysiologists, cardiac surgeons, hospital buyers and regulators. Their visual language follows from that. A heart valve, a stent or a pacemaker is small, precise and usually hidden inside the body once it is in use, so the product photograph does much of the work. Valves, stents and leads tend to be shot in close-up on white or pale grey, lit to show struts, mesh and metal edges, with the device itself as the only subject.

The second register is the catheterisation laboratory. Brochures, websites and congress stands return again and again to the same scene: a patient table, a C-arm X-ray system arched over it, banks of monitors showing angiograms or mapping images, and clinicians in scrubs, lead aprons and caps. These pictures place the device in the room where it is used, without showing the patient’s body in detail.

Between the two sits illustration. Cutaway hearts, cross-sections of arteries and simplified diagrams of the conduction system explain where a valve sits, how a stent opens or how a lead reaches the heart. They are often rendered in reds and soft pinks against white, with the brand’s own colour kept for the device, the arrows and the type. Much of the copy is technical, built around product names, trial names and regulatory approvals as the companies state them.

Much of the category’s public life happens at medical congresses. TCT in the United States, EuroPCR in Paris and the ESC Congress of the European Society of Cardiology bring makers, clinicians and trade press together each year, and companies use them to show new devices and announce study results. The makers in this guide range from family-owned German engineering firms to Chinese groups with several listed subsidiaries, and their identities reflect that range more than any shared house style.

A standalone business inside Johnson & Johnson MedTech.

Abiomed is no longer an independent company. Johnson & Johnson announced the purchase in November 2022, English Wikipedia says, and in a press release dated 22 December 2022 Johnson & Johnson said it had completed the acquisition. The release said Abiomed would operate as a standalone business within Johnson & Johnson’s MedTech segment, and placed its heart-recovery products alongside the group’s Biosense Webster electrophysiology business.

The public face of the brand has shifted with it. The old abiomed.com address now redirects to heartrecovery.com, which presents the business as “Heart Recovery at Johnson & Johnson MedTech” and describes the Impella pumps as designed to let the heart rest and recover by improving blood flow or temporarily assisting its pumping. The Abiomed name survives on the website in the ABIOMED Collaborative Care clinical support service. English Wikipedia lists the headquarters as Danvers, with further offices in Woburn, Baltimore, Berlin, Aachen and Tokyo.

Abiomed’s story runs in two directions at once: an American artificial-heart project and a German university pump that became its main product. That mix of Danvers and Aachen is the thread through its record, from the AbioCor trials of 2001 to the Impella range sold today under the Johnson & Johnson MedTech banner.

For a design guide, Abiomed shows how an acquired medtech name can recede behind a product name and a parent group while its history stays specific. Compare Edwards Lifesciences, another American heart-device maker, and Shockwave Medical, a heart-device maker also covered in this series. For this guide we use a deep red, graphite and a pale blush with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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