FIELD NOTE
J&J paid $400 million for an early-stage heart device. Three years later, the team that built it owns it again.
A new company called Jaguar LAA, based in Santa Rosa, California, says it has acquired the Laminar left atrial appendage program from Johnson & Johnson. Terms weren’t disclosed. Santé Ventures and members of Laminar’s former management put together Jaguar, and its CEO is Randy Lashinski, who ran Laminar before the sale and worked at J&J after. Part of the development team goes with him.
J&J bought Laminar in November 2023 for $400 million upfront, with clinical and regulatory milestones on top, and took an in-process R&D charge worth roughly 17 cents of adjusted EPS that year. The evidence behind that price was an early feasibility study of up to 45 patients. At the time of the deal, BTIG’s analysts had 12-month results on 15 of them: every closure successful, no safety events, no device-related thrombus.
The pitch was mechanical. Boston Scientific’s Watchman and Abbott’s Amulet expand inside the appendage and seal it, which leaves an implant facing the bloodstream. Laminar’s catheter gathers the appendage tissue from the inside, rotates it shut and holds it there, so the pouch is eliminated and very little hardware stays exposed in the left atrium. If that works, the argument for less device-related clotting and a lighter drug regimen writes itself.
Biosense Webster started the pivotal IDE study in February 2024: 1,500 patients, up to 100 U.S. sites, randomized against the commercial devices. Enrollment was suspended in mid-2025. The ClinicalTrials.gov record gives the reason as potential unwrapping of the appendage after implant, with “clinically significant leaks.” A twist that doesn’t stay twisted is exactly the kind of failure 15 patients at one year won’t show you and a few hundred will.
J&J told MedTech Dive the sale reflects a “disciplined approach to portfolio management” and gives the program dedicated ownership. That’s a reasonable description. J&J is spinning out orthopedics, and the same Biosense Webster unit that housed Laminar has a pulsed field ablation fight on its hands.
The other half of the story is what happened to the market while the trial was paused. Watchman sales grew nearly 30% in 2025, to $1.96 billion. By the second quarter of this year that growth was 4.3%, and Boston Scientific cut guidance in part because standalone Watchman procedures are declining. Mike Mahoney told investors he expects the second half to shrink and isn’t assuming any Watchman growth in 2027.
Put those together and J&J’s decision gets simple. In 2023 it paid a growth-market price for feasibility-stage evidence. By 2026 the device needed a fix and, presumably, a new trial, and the category it was supposed to enter had stopped growing. Funding a redesign and another four-figure randomized study inside a company with better uses for the money is a hard case to make.
For anyone building toward an exit, the sequence matters more than the outcome. Laminar’s investors were paid on 15 patients. The acquirer then ran the experiment that mattered, a randomized comparison against two entrenched devices, and absorbed the result. That is the trade a strategic makes when it buys early, and it is why upfront-versus-milestone structure deserves as much attention as the headline number. The $400 million cleared. The milestones were tied to clinical and regulatory progress that didn’t arrive.
Jaguar starts with things most startups don’t have: a device that has been through a large trial, the people who built it, and a detailed picture of how it fails. What it hasn’t said is whether the unwrapping problem is a design issue, a patient-selection issue, or something harder. Santé didn’t answer MedTech Dive’s question about whether a new trial is planned. Until that’s clear, the differentiated mechanism is still a hypothesis, only now it’s being tested on venture money instead of J&J’s.
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