Editorial comment on the RESPOND study

It was a real pleasure to write an Editorial comment for this issue of the Journal of Thoracic Disease. We read with great interest the paper of Volkmar Falk, submitted to the European Heart Journal describing the safety and efficacy of the transcatheter Lotus™ valve (Boston Scientific Corporation, Marlborough, Massachusetts, USA) (1). In Essen, we had the great opportunity to be involved within the early and first-in-man implantation of the predecessor of the Lotus™ valve, the Sadra™ TAVI (transcatheter aortic valve implantation) system, in collaboration with Raimund Erbel and Eberhard Grube in 2007. The abovementioned paper summarized the results of a prospective, multi-centre, open-label and single-arm registry (RESPOND: Repositionable Lotus Valve System-Post Market Evaluation of Real World Clinical Outcomes) from 41 centres in Europe, New Zealand and Latin America in a total of 1,014 patients.