LPL Systems Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., which produces laser-based machine tool systems for the fabrication of medical devices, turned to fiber lasers from SPI Lasers plc of Los Gatos, Calif., to cut stents, primarily to reduce maintenance costs. Advantages of fiber lasers over flashlamp-pumped solid-state lasers include high stability, a small footprint, low maintenance and energy efficiency.

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CME Program from TCTMD Web site (require free registration)

The Growing Body of Drug-Eluting Stent Data: A CE-Certified Webcast Clinical Trials and Real-World Results
 Estimated time to complete activity: 1.5 hours

Target Audience. This educational activity has been developed for interventional cardiologists, interventional cardiology fellows, cardiac catheterization nurses, and technologists.

Accreditation/Designation of Credit Statement. The Health Science Center for Continuing Medical Education designates this educational activity for a maximum of 1.5 category 1 credits toward the AMA Physician’s Recognition Award. Each physician should claim only those credits that he/she actually spent in the activity.

Abbott Laboratories‘ emerging vascular device business achieved another milestone this month after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a company-made tool doctors will use to reseal arteries after catheter procedures.

Abbott’s StarClose device is used to reseal arteries that have been punctured to make room for the catheter, a tube that is snaked through an artery and used to perform diagnostic tests or to make way for artery-opening stent procedures.

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Press release

Boston Scientific Corp. and Johnson & Johnson are mining U.S. product safety reports as a new marketing weapon in their battle over the $5 billion-a-year drug-coated heart stent business.

In comments to reporters last month, J&J cited so-called adverse event filings to argue that its Cypher stent caused fewer injuries during implantation than Boston Scientific’s Taxus. Boston Scientific answered that the same U.S. Food and Drug Administration database linked the Taxus to 28 percent fewer deaths than the Cypher.

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Authors conducted a retrospective analysis of a national hospital discharge database to evaluate in-hospital mortality among patients who underwent PCI (n = 2,500,796) or CABG (n = 1,496,937) between 1998 and 2001. They calculated the number of patients treated at low volume hospitals and simulated the number of deaths potentially averted by moving all patients to high volume hospitals under best-case conditions (i.e., assuming the full volume-associated reduction in mortality and the capacity to move all patients to high volume hospitals with no related harms).

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The intracoronary changes that occur after brachytherapy for in-stent restenosis (ISR) have yet to be fully established. The purpose of this study in patients who had ISR was to examine the serial angioscopic changes in intracoronary lesions that occurred after brachytherapy.
PubMed abstract

Boston Scientific Corp. and Johnson & Johnson are mining U.S. product safety reports as a new marketing weapon in their battle over the $5 billion-a-year drug-coated heart stent business.

In comments to reporters last month, J&J cited so-called “adverse event” filings to argue that its Cypher stent caused fewer injuries during implantation than Boston Scientific’s Taxus. Boston Scientific answered that the same U.S. Food and Drug Administration database linked the Taxus to 28 percent fewer deaths than the Cypher.

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From April 2003 through December 2004, researchers found 17 allergic reactions that likely were caused by stents.

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MIV Therapeutics, Inc. (OTCBB:MIVT) (FWB:MIV), a leading developer of new-generation biocompatible coatings and advanced drug delivery systems, has announced that the Company was the subject of an article in a recent issue of “Der Aktionar,” an investment and finance periodical published in Germany, which praised the medical and marketplace potential of the Company’s innovative drug-eluting stent technologies as well as its novel stroke-preventing devices.

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Improved materials may allow stents, tiny metal scaffolds inserted into blood vessels, to better deliver beneficial genes to patients with heart disease, by reducing the risk of inflammation that often negates initial benefits. The new technique, using a compound that binds in an extremely thin layer to bare metal surfaces, may have potential uses in other areas of medicine that make use of metallic implants.

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New data from a Spanish study presented at the 2005 American Heart Association Scientific Sessions found that patients with bifurcation lesions fared significantly better when treated with the CYPHER® Sirolimus-eluting Coronary Stent compared with the Taxus stent in the areas of late loss, re-treatment (total lesion revascularization or TLR) and re-blockage (restenosis). Bifurcated lesions are difficult to treat because the lesion is divided between two branches of the artery.

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Building on 18 years at the forefront of technology and innovation, the International Symposium on Endovascular Therapy continues to serve the endovascular medical and scientific communities by presenting the latest advances in the field.

Pre-registration deadline: January 6, 2006

Symposium home page

Purpose: To determine and compare the rates of in-stent restenosis, late clinical deterioration, and stent fractures in nitinol stents versus Wallstents implanted for suboptimal angioplasty in the superficial femoral artery (SFA).

Published in the Journal of Endovascular Therapy: Vol. 12, No. 6, pp. 676–684.

Keywords: peripheral artery disease, superficial femoral artery, stents, nitinol stent, restenosis, stent fracture

The Study Purpose: Testing the safety and foreign body reaction (FBR) of a nitinol self-expandable carbon-coated stent system in the porcine animal model at different follow-up (FU) periods.

From University of Geneva, Switzerland
Published in the  Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Medicine

Mayo Clinic Interventional Cardiology Review (Hardcover) by Joseph G., M.D. Murphy (Editor)

This 1000 pages book will been released 28 December 2005. You may order it now and Amazon will ship it to you when it arrives.

Mayo Clinic Interventional Cardiology Review