Vanishing Stents - Part 1
Vanishing Stents - Part 1
Your Host - Ronald Trahan, President
Ronald Trahan Associates, Inc.
medtechmatters.com®
What if there were a stent that could promote natural remodeling of an injured artery after angioplasty and then just disappear? “Just three years ago bioabsorbable stents seemed to be more of a nice to have than a need to have. After all, drug-eluting stents (DES) were seen as the answer to restenosis and showed very minimal risks to patient safety. Johnson & Johnson and Boston Scientific had the clear lead in introducing Cypher and Taxus, respectively, to the interventional community, with Medtronic, Guidant, and Abbott Laboratories bringing up the rear. Then in September 2006 at the World Congress of Cardiology meeting...DES were linked to a four-letter word—clot. The very same device that staved off restenosis was delivering a new danger—late-stage thrombosis. Furthermore, clinicians and corporate executives once again began asking a question they thought they had answered: why deploy a permanent implant on a short-term mission of clearing a coronary artery?” (Source: ‘Bioabsorbable Stents’, Start-Up, January 2007) In this episode, we consider a Paris-based company—ARTERIAL REMODELING TECHNOLOGIES (“ART”). ART’s stent is designed to provide the requisite initial acute mechanical scaffolding but, as it dismantles due to bioresorbability, the possibility of arterial remodeling returns to the artery.