Market Opportunities

Industry sources estimate that 30,000 patients are diagnosed with ruptured cerebral aneurysms each year in the United States. Embolic coiling is currently being used to treat approximately 30% of patients diagnosed with cerebral aneurysms in the United States. Industry sources also indicate that a significant percentage of patients diagnosed with cerebral aneurysms in European countries are treated using embolic coiling procedures and we believe that embolic coiling procedures can be used to treat a similar percentage of patients with cerebral aneurysms in the United States as awareness grows among patients and physicians of the advantages of embolic coiling.

In a report published in 2002, Frost & Sullivan projected that the compound annual growth rate in the number of embolic coiling procedures in the U.S. would be 17% for the period from 2001 to 2008. We believe that the growth in the number of embolic coiling procedures since 2002 has been largely due to the ISAT study. We believe that additional drivers of the growth in the market for embolic coiling products include the overall trend towards less invasive procedures, an increased number of interventionalists trained toperform embolic coiling procedures, and the aging population in whom aneurysms occur with greater frequency.