Surmodics (Nasdaq:SRDX) announced results from a sex-specific analysis of real-world patients in a study of its Pounce thrombectomy system.
The analysis evaluated 160 acute, subacute and chronic thrombotic limb ischemia patients from the PROWL registry. Dr. Peter Monteleone presented findings at the 2025 Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics conference in San Francisco.
PROWL evaluates the Pounce system for the non-surgical removal of emboli and thrombi in the peripheral arterial vasculature. The registry collects real-world efficacy and safety outcomes for endovascular interventions using the fully mechanical, non-aspiration-based system. It includes up to 500 patients across up to 30 sites.
Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based Surmodics describes Pounce systems as “grab-and-go” solutions — deployable and simple to use. Each system features a delivery catheter, a basket wire and a funnel catheter. The basket wire deploys two nitinol self-expanding baskets, which capture the clot before retracting into the nitinol collection funnel. With the clot entrained, the system withdraws into a guide sheath, which removes the clot from the body. The latest version, Pounce XL, launched earlier this year.
A look at the findings from Surmodics
Most patients in the evaluated subset of PROWL received the Pounce system for use in peripheral arteries 3.5-6 mm in diameter. The analysis looked at a subset of 160 patients (60 female, 100 male) who received Pounce in symptomatic, infrainguinal vessels, followed through 30 days.
Surmodics reports 94.7% procedural success in female patients and 89.9% in male patients. It describes procedural success as the restoration of pulsatile flow in target lesions with or without adjunctive treatment. Technical success — described as restoration of blood flow to target lesion(s) with <50% residual obstruction without the need to initiate catheter-directed thrombolysis or to proceed to open surgery or other endovascular thrombectomy devices — occurred in 91.4% and 78.3% of target lesions for female and male patients respectively. This reflected a significant difference between groups.
Thrombus removal came through as complete or substantial in 93.8% of female patients and 94.3% of male patients. That includes 71.4% of female patients and 78.9% of male patients following use of Pounce. Freedom from all-cause major adverse events occurred in 73.3% of female patients and 86% of male patients.
“Use of the Pounce thrombectomy platform achieved high procedural success in both women and men, with significantly greater technical success in women,” said Dr. Monteleone. “However, women experienced a trend toward less favorable clinical outcomes than men. These findings are consistent with prior evidence of elevated risk for female patients receiving limb ischemia interventions.
“Acute limb ischemia is a hugely morbid and expensive disease, with enormous variability in patient presentation, clot characteristics, and the anatomic locations of these clots. This variability has made endovascular management of ALI very challenging using the thrombectomy tools previously available to us. The Pounce thrombectomy platform is revolutionary—it gives physicians a reliable endovascular-first option for treating complex thromboembolic clots in high-risk patients without surgical embolectomy.”
