Balloon-Expandable Versus Self-expanding Transcatheter Heart Valve for Treatment of Symptomatic Native Aortic Valve Stenosis (BEST)

Over the last years, several randomized studies comparing transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) to surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR) have established TAVI as a treatment option in symptomatic patients with aortic stenosis (AS) (1,2,3). Most transcatheter heart valves (THV) available are designed on either a balloon-expandable (BE) or a self-expanding (SE) concept.

Despite major differences, both designs are recommended to be used indifferently in most of the clinical situations and a significant number of centers only implant one of this two THV design. It remains unclear however, whether these 2 very different THV concepts are achieving similar or different clinical outcomes and could be considered a single "Class" of device. While there is an urgent clinical need to clarify this issue in an exponentially growing therapeutic field, to date no large randomized study powered to compare the 2 THV designs on individual endpoints has been conducted or initiated. Recently, two large-scale French registry-based propensity matched analyses, including more than 30,000 patients, have reported a higher 90 days and 1-year mortality with the use of SE as compared to BE-valve (4,5). However, as the propensity-score matching-approach cannot rule out residual confounders, and as some of the most recent THV iterations were not part of the investigation, there is an urgent need to conduct a randomized trial sufficiently powered to compare head-to-head the latest generation of SE and BE-valve on all-cause mortality. In addition, two small randomized studies have recently showed the inferiority of a new SE-valve compared to BE-valve and SE-THV (SCOPE1 trial, J Lanz. Lancet. 2019 Nov 2;394(10209):1619-1628. and SCOPE 2 trial, Circulation in press), thus further questioning wether THV should be considered as a single "Class" regardless the THV design.

The objective of the present randomized clinical investigation will be to evaluate the impact of THV design (SE vs BE) on the risk of all-cause mortality at 90 days and 1 year.

The present clinical investigation will the first randomized clinical investigation to compare head to head the benefit of BE-valve over SE-valve on total mortality at 90 days and 1-year using a superiority design. Previous head-to-head studies included only a small number of patients, non-inferiority designs and combined endpoints. This clinical investigation will be the first to generate sufficient evidences to change clinical practice and international guidelines to clarify whether one THV design is superior (or not) to the other one (BE vs SE-valve). The result of the clinical investigation is key for clinicians indicating the treatment and for the patients receiving the treatment