New Stent Alleviates Arterial Blood Clots
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With drug-coated stents, known as drug-eluting stents, such repeat procedures dropped to the single digits. But recent studies have indicated that drug-eluting stents also have problems. In March, a study by University Hospital in Basel, Switzerland, found that drug-and-polymer-coated stents were continuing to release anti-scarring drugs into a patient’s arterial walls long after the therapy was no longer required. The result, according to the study, was effectively to create an open wound in the artery beside the stent that contributed to platelet clotting, and ultimately to thrombosis-related heart attacks.
The coating polymers may also be suspect: they have to be far more robust than the compounds used in Conor’s reservoir-laced stents in order to withstand the friction that comes with inserting the stent into a patient. With the new stent design, the polymers aren’t exposed to friction because they sit, slightly recessed, in the stents’ reservoirs.
“Some people feel the polymers themselves are the problem, that when they break down they might have a negative effect on the vascular system,” explains James Barry, vice president of corporate research and advanced technology development at Boston Scientific in Natick, MA, one the nation’s two largest stent makers.
Last month, the Wall Street Journal conducted an informal survey of U.S. cardiologists, reporting that many of them were worried enough about clots and thrombosis to curtail the use of the coated stents. Hence, the push for a new stent design has picked up momentum.
“I am an absolute believer in the virtues of reservoirs for drug delivery,” says John Santini Jr., founder and president of MicroChips in Bedford, MA. One of those virtues, Santini notes, is that the drugs can be mixed into compounds as simple and biologically friendly as thickened glucose, instead of complex polymers.
Other manufacturers are also working on addressing the concerns with polymer-coated stents. Boston Scientific is in the early stages of developing a polymer-free stent that uses “nano-porous markings and torturous channels” etched along the device’s metal struts to hold drugs in place, says Barry. In theory, such devices, he says, would allow micrograms of drugs in a liquid, polymer-free suspension to settle into the tiny carved channels. After the stent is inserted, the drugs would “find their way” out of the stent and into the artery, he says, much the way water flows out of a sponge.
Conor Medsystems expects current U.S. trials of its CoStar stent, involving 1,700 volunteers, to be completed by spring 2007. If they’re successful, the reservoir stent could hit the American market next year, Shanley says.
“Think of those tablets you used to make paints for Easter eggs,” he says. “The way the color would dissolve into the water is a similar idea. What we want is to make the drugs dissolve safely in the same way, but at rates we can control.”
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