Counting the Results of AtriAN's EIC Accelerator AFib Therapy

AtriAN Medical set out to treat atrial fibrillation, the most common heart rhythm disorder, from the outside of the heart. Instead of scarring heart muscle from inside, as standard catheter ablation does, its device delivers short pulses of electric field to clusters of nerve cells, the ganglionated plexi, that sit in the fat on the heart's outer surface and are thought to trigger the arrhythmia. The idea came from Mayo Clinic; the company was set up in Galway in 2017 to develop it. In the European Commission's list of EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 winners of the 5 June 2019 cut-off, the grant-only forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, "Atrian Medical Ltd" of Galway is listed for Neuron-AFib, with no other company named for the project.

The EU paid €2,348,941 towards a €3,358,205 project that ran from 1 November 2019 to 31 July 2022, according to CORDIS. The proposal promised a clinical trial leading to CE marking by 2022 and FDA approval by 2026. The trial happened. The approvals have not been announced.

Where AtriAN Stands Now

The company is still registered and filing. The Irish Companies Registration Office lists Atrian Medical Limited with status "Normal"; its latest financial statements, for the year to 31 October 2025, were filed on 7 September 2026 together with an annual return, according to SoloCheck. OpenCorporates, which draws on the same register, shows the same status and earlier filings in July 2025 and September 2024, plus an amended constitution adopted by special resolution in March 2024. The accounts themselves are behind a paywall, so staff numbers, losses and cash could not be checked for this article.

Research output continues. A computer modelling study published in Bioengineering in July 2026, co-written with the Universitat Politècnica de València, lists Barry O'Brien as an AtriAN employee and Ken Coffey as "a former employee and a shareholder". A year earlier, in a pig study in Heart Rhythm by researchers in Copenhagen and Maastricht, Coffey was still declared an employee. Who leads the company now is not public.

The company's website says AtriAN "has raised over €5M in funding" and is "seeking expressions of interest from investors for the next phase". No round after the 2019 seed has been announced, and the company does not appear in the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked across all 16 pages for this article. That is expected: the June 2019 round was grant only.

The Technology: Ablating Nerves, Not Muscle

Standard catheter ablation for atrial fibrillation burns or freezes the inside wall of the heart to build a line of scar that blocks stray electrical signals from the pulmonary veins. AtriAN's argument, set out in its 2019 seed announcement through NUI Galway, is that this treats the effect rather than the source. Its device "selectively and non-thermally" treats five locations on the outside surface of the heart where it says the arrhythmia starts, knocking out hyperactive nerve cells.

The energy is pulsed field ablation (PFA), which kills cells by opening their membranes with very short, strong electric fields rather than by heat. Most companies use PFA inside the heart, as a replacement for heat, the company notes on its website; AtriAN applies it on the outer surface, where the ganglia sit in fat. The company's own modelling papers argue that the field concentrates in the fat layer and drops off in the muscle beneath, which would explain why the nerves are ablated while the heart muscle is largely spared, according to the CORDIS project report and the company's publication list. Whether this nerve-targeting approach, known as cardioneuroablation, actually reduces atrial fibrillation in the long run has not been tested in a randomised trial.

What Neuron-AFib Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The CORDIS objective is precise. AtriAN would finalise device testing and validation, then run a clinical trial "with equal female and male enrolment" to demonstrate safety and efficacy. It planned "CE approvals by 2022 and FDA approval by 2026" and "conservatively" estimated turnover of €85 million a year within one year of approval. It said it had already raised €3.8 million and needed another €2.4 million for the work.

The final periodic report, covering February 2021 to July 2022, describes a narrower outcome. The first-in-human trial was completed with 24 patients at two sites, all undergoing open-chest heart surgery such as coronary bypass, and showed that ablating the nerve sites was "both feasible and safe". The study was then extended by 12 patients who also had a history of atrial fibrillation. A minimally invasive version of the device, reaching the heart through a small needle access below the breastbone, was designed and tested in animals, and the report says it would be ready for clinical evaluation "with some final manufacturing optimization". The report frames the result as a step towards "further trials in order to get regulatory approvals". In other words, the project ended where the proposal had expected CE marking to be within reach, at feasibility.

1. Finalise device testing and validationDeliveredGenerator and open-chest catheters used in two approved trials, per ClinicalTrials.gov.
2. First-in-human safety trialDelivered24 patients, no device-related adverse events; published in 2023.
3. Efficacy data in AF patientsPartly12-patient single-arm study, all in sinus rhythm at 12 months; no control group.
4. Equal female and male enrolmentNot achieved9 women among 36 patients.
5. Minimally invasive devicePartlyTested in pigs and dogs; no human trial registered.
6. CE marking by 2022Not achievedNo CE mark announced by the company or reported elsewhere.

The grant was spent on what the company could reasonably do in 33 months, and the clinical work was real and published. But the proposal sold the EU a route to market approval by 2022, and four years after the project closed that milestone has not been announced, so under this series' rules it counts as not delivered. The overall rating is partly delivered.

The Two Trials in Detail

NEURAL AF, registered as NCT04775264, treated 24 patients undergoing coronary bypass surgery at Na Homolce Hospital in Prague and the Tbilisi Heart and Vascular Clinic in Georgia, starting in May 2021. The peer-reviewed results, led by Mount Sinai's Daniel Musikantow and Vivek Reddy, report that 23 of the 24 patients received the full ablation protocol, with no device-related adverse effects and a 20.7% average extension of the atrial effective refractory period, a measure of how resistant the tissue is to fibrillation. The ClinicalTrials.gov results entry, by contrast, records the field as delivered to all target sites in all 24 patients; the two sources do not match. Post-operative atrial fibrillation occurred in 7 patients, or 29%, and the authors conclude that "large, randomized analyses are necessary".

NEURAL AF-2, NCT05426759, enrolled 12 surgery patients with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation in Tbilisi from June 2022, as Cardiac Rhythm News reported when enrolment closed. The results letter in JACC: Clinical Electrophysiology in 2024 found no post-operative atrial fibrillation; the company's summary notes one short asymptomatic episode at three months in one patient. All 12 were in sinus rhythm at 12 months, according to the registry. Twelve patients without a comparison group cannot show efficacy, and both trials were run in people already having open-chest surgery, not in the much larger group of patients who would need the minimally invasive version.

The Money

AtriAN's only announced equity round is the €2.3 million seed it closed in October 2019, led by the Western Development Commission with Mayo Clinic Ventures, Enterprise Ireland, Atlantic Bridge and Xenium Capital, according to the university and Global University Venturing, which reported that Atlantic Bridge invested through its University Bridge Fund. Before that, an Enterprise Ireland Commercialisation Fund project, co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund, paid for the pre-clinical work at NUI Galway.

The numbers do not reconcile cleanly. The EU proposal, written before the seed round closed, says €3.8 million had already been raised. The website now says "over €5M". Whether that figure includes the €2.35 million EU grant is not stated. Either way, the money raised is a small fraction of what a pivotal trial and two regulatory approvals for a cardiac ablation system usually cost, and the website's call for investors suggests the next round has not been closed.

Why Europe Should Care

Cardiovascular disease kills 1.7 million people a year in the EU, and on 16 December 2025 the Commission unveiled the Safe Hearts Plan, its first plan for cardiovascular health, with treatment and care as one of its pillars, as the World Heart Federation summarised it. The project's CORDIS report puts the cost of atrial fibrillation at about 2.6% of all healthcare spending in Europe. A European company with its own patented approach, clinical data and a Mayo Clinic licence is the kind of asset EU innovation funding is meant to keep in Europe. That only matters if it reaches patients.

The Verdict

AtriAN Medical has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements, trial registries and EU project data, linked throughout.