Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy Patents: Top Companies & Trends 2026
- 82.2% of all 5,111 records sit with just five assignees, one of the most concentrated fields in cardiac rhythm management.
- Filings fell 61% from 2021 to 2024 (202 to 79), the last span the data treats as complete, after peaking in 2018 at 294.
- A61N electrotherapy claims cover 84.4% of records leaving informatics and imaging classes each under 3% of the same 5,111-record base.
Filing growth compares 2021 (202 records) with 2024 (79) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 5,111 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What the filing record shows
Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) patenting concentrates on hardware and control logic for biventricular and multipoint pacing rather than software or diagnostics layered on top of it. The search set spans coronary sinus lead placement, atrioventricular delay tuning, phrenic nerve stimulation avoidance, multipoint pacing and device optimization — the technical vocabulary that separates a CRT-specific filing from generic pacemaker art. Across 5,111 records published between 2015 and mid-2026, the field reads as mature and consolidated: a small set of device makers built the core lead-placement and pacing-control art years ago, and later filings mostly add optimization and monitoring refinements on top of it.
Publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so the most recent one to two years in any trend understate real filing activity. The picture below treats 2024 as the last complete year and reads 2025-2026 as still filling in.
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Filing trend and technology composition
Two views of the same 5,111-record set: how filing volume has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses the claims actually sit in.
Filing trend, 2017-2026
Annual filings ran from 195 in 2017 to a peak of 294 in 2018, then declined to 9 in 2026 (a partial year). The only span the data treats as complete enough to trust is 2021 to 2024, where filings fell 61% (202 to 79) — a real pullback in new CRT-specific filing, not an artefact of publication lag.
Technology composition by IPC subclass
A61N (electrotherapy and radiation therapy) covers 84.4% of the 5,111 records, confirming that CRT patenting is overwhelmingly about the stimulation device and its control logic. A61B (diagnosis and surgery) sits at 38.6%, reflecting lead-placement and sensing claims filed alongside the therapy itself. Every other subclass — healthcare informatics, body-fluid devices, implants, digital data processing, medicinal preparations, imaging — sits at or below 2.9% of records, each a narrow adjunct rather than a parallel claim strategy.
Shares are the percentage of the 5,111 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
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Try EurekaMost-cited records and a representative filing
Systems and methods for intermittent multipoint pacing (US20170157403A1, Pacesetter)
The present disclosure provides systems and methods for applying intermittent multipoint pacing. An implantable cardiac device includes a plurality of electrodes, and a controller communicatively coupled to the plurality of electrodes and configured to cause the plurality of electrodes to alternate between applying multipoint pacing (MPP) and standard biventricular pacing (BiV) to a patient's heart.Filed by Pacesetter and published 2017-06-08, this filing sits squarely in the multipoint pacing sub-area and illustrates the claim style dominant in the top-cited group: a controller that switches pacing modes rather than a new lead geometry or sensor.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20050115561A1 | Patient monitoring, diagnosis, and/or therapy systems and methods | 1,106 |
| 2 | US20100268059A1 | Therapy optimization via multi-dimensional mapping | 494 |
| 3 | US20100234906A1 | System and method for controlling rate-adaptive pacing based on a cardiac force-frequency relation detected b… | 424 |
| 4 | US6928324B2 | Stimulation device for sleep apnea prevention, detection and treatment | 419 |
| 5 | US7787946B2 | Patient monitoring, diagnosis, and/or therapy systems and methods | 371 |
| 6 | US20030195571A1 | Method and apparatus for the treatment of central sleep apnea using biventricular pacing | 352 |
| 7 | US20030153953A1 | Stimulation device for sleep apnea prevention, detection and treatment | 351 |
| 8 | US5700283A | Method and apparatus for pacing patients with severe congestive heart failure | 349 |
| 9 | US5584868A | Cardiac stimulating apparatus and method for heart failure therapy | 347 |
| 10 | US20080021336A1 | Devices and methods for accelerometer-based characterization of cardiac synchrony and dyssynchrony | 318 |
Citation counts favour older filings simply because they have had longer to accumulate citations inside the corpus; treat this table as a signal of influence, not of which patents matter most today.
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Browse MCP servers →What the numbers mean for a filing decision
Three read-throughs from the concentration, technology mix and momentum data.
The core art is locked up
With five assignees holding 82.2% of all 5,111 records and the top ten holding 88.6%, coronary sinus lead design and core biventricular pacing control sit on dense prior art built by a handful of device makers. A new entrant filing directly against that art faces a crowded field; the opportunity is more likely in adjacent optimization or monitoring claims than in the core pacing mechanism itself.
Filing has genuinely slowed, not just lagged
The three-year span from 2021 to 2024 is the last one the data treats as complete, and it shows a 61% drop in filings. That follows a 2018 peak of 294 filings and suggests the core technology has settled into incremental refinement rather than active new claim-staking, at least among the incumbents already holding the ground.
Claims cluster on the device, not the data layer
A61N electrotherapy claims cover 84.4% of records while healthcare informatics (G16H) and digital data processing (G06F) sit at 2.9% and 2.0% respectively. Software-driven optimization of an existing CRT device — rather than the pacing hardware itself — is a comparatively open claim space by volume, even though it is not where most of the citation activity sits.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to cardiac resynchronization therapy, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who is filing, and who has pulled back
The leader board is heavily front-loaded, and recent-year momentum shows most of the named assignees pulling back sharply rather than accelerating.
Medtronic holds the largest single share
Medtronic's 2,153 records dwarf the next several assignees combined, consistent with a company that built much of the foundational coronary sinus lead and biventricular pacing art. Its latest-year momentum shows only 4 filings, an 88% year-on-year drop, in line with the broader 2021-2024 slowdown rather than a company-specific retreat.
A steep drop after the top names
Fifth place sits at 137 records and tenth place at 33 — a gap that shows most of the remaining activity concentrated in a short list before thinning into a long tail of single-digit filers among the ranked leaders.
Pullback is broad, not isolated
Pacesetter shows 2 filings in the latest year (-80% YoY), and several other named assignees show zero filings in the latest year with -100% YoY momentum. That pattern across multiple incumbents supports reading the 2021-2024 decline as a field-wide pause in new CRT-specific filing rather than one company exiting.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Medtronic Inc | 4 | -88% |
| PACESETTER INC | 2 | -80% |
| Biotronik SE & Co KG | 1 | -50% |
| Cardiac Pacemakers Inc | 0 | -100% |
| BackBeat Medical Inc | 0 | -100% |
| ST JUDE MEDICAL AB | 0 | — |
| Sorin CRM | 0 | -100% |
| Biotronik CRM Patent AG | 0 | — |
Where to take this analysis
The dataset points to a consolidated core and a thinner set of adjacent claim areas. Two practical next steps follow from that.
Map freedom-to-operate against the top holders
With 82.2% of records held by five assignees, any new CRT filing needs a claim chart against that concentrated prior art before committing engineering resources to the core pacing mechanism.
Run a freedom-to-operate check in Eureka →Probe the informatics and optimization sub-areas
G16H and G06F together sit under 5% of records combined, well below the device-hardware classes, suggesting less-crowded ground for software-driven CRT optimization claims.
Explore white space in Eureka →Common questions about CRT patents
One assignee holds 2,153 of the 5,111 records in this dataset, a substantially larger share than any other filer. The next several companies hold much smaller counts, with fifth place at 137 records and tenth place at 33. Overall, the top five assignees combined account for 82.2% of all records in scope, so the field is best described as led by one company with a small group of secondary filers behind it, rather than evenly contested.
Based on the last span of data treated as complete, filing slowed: 2021 saw 202 filings and 2024 saw 79, a 61% decline. Filing peaked earlier, in 2018, at 294. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the years after 2024 are still filling in and should not be read as confirming or reversing that trend yet.
This Pacesetter filing, published 2017-06-08, claims a system and method for intermittent multipoint pacing: an implantable cardiac device with multiple electrodes and a controller that alternates between multipoint pacing and standard biventricular pacing. It is a control-logic claim covering the switching behaviour between pacing modes, not a new electrode or lead geometry. Anyone building a device that alternates MPP and BiV pacing modes under controller logic should review this filing's specific claim language for overlap.
By technology class, healthcare informatics (G16H) and digital data processing (G06F) each cover under 3% of the 5,111 records, far below the 84.4% held by core electrotherapy claims (A61N). This suggests software-driven device optimization, responder-rate prediction and related data-layer claims are comparatively less claimed by volume, even though they sit alongside a heavily filed hardware core. That gap does not guarantee freedom to operate, since a small number of high-citation records can still block specific approaches.
The United States leads with 2,660 filings in this dataset, followed by the European Patent Office at 889 and the WIPO PCT route at 644. Germany, Austria and Australia each show smaller but notable volumes. This distribution reflects where the leading device makers seek protection first and where litigation and reimbursement pressure around cardiac devices is highest.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.