Absorbable Heart Stent

Article can be found in here

Stents are made with the main purpose to open the blockage passage of arteries wall and remain opened so blood can keep flowing and prevent future heart blockages. Mostly all the stents are made of metal mesh, which it is inflexible and becomes very hard to be manipulated and implant it carefully. Another problem for this type of material is that metal mesh is a foreigner agent. Arteries often grow scar tissues to cover them, and since the material is foreigner, it may also cause accumulation of white blood cells attacking the surrounding stents. This results a big problem for patients because white blood cells can "clog" the arteries.

Scientists and engineers from Abbott Laboratories Inc. have engineered an absorbable heart stent proved to restore arterial's natural flexibility after being completely natural dissolved after the placement. These absorvable heart stents were designed to be biodegradable over time. In other words, it can be decomposed into simple but not harmful molecules into the blood stream, such as lactic acid, carbon dioxide and water. Thus, this prevents the scar tissue growing from the arteries.

Researches at Erasmus Hospital in Amsterdam reported that this absorbable heart stent has proven to be safe and effective in patients with heart blockage conditions after six to nine month after implanting them. These initial results from these studies, according to the author of the article, "were so encouraging that the European Union approved the Absorb stent in January 2011 without extensive testing. About 7 per cent of patients implanted with the stent suffered adverse events, including heart attacks, but this is much better than the results of implanting metal stents".

I find this video interesting because among the three Biomedical Engineering tracks offered at Texas A&M University (TAMU), the Biomaterials and Tissue engineering is the one I choose as my BMEN track. Therefore, I am very interested on designing biomaterials able to improve today's medical devices. This topic may not be new for many of us. In fact, I heard that Dr. Grumlan, a professor of Biomedical Engineering at TAMU, is conducting researches about biodegrable materials for medical devices, which stents is one of them.

Here is a video about how the absorbable stent works