Abstract

A comparison of Drug Eluting Stents with different coatings in rabbit iliac artery model

Author(s): Dmitry V Kapustin, Natalia Yu Orlinskaya and Kseniya V Kulakova

Background: New generation of Drug Eluting Stents significantly reduce restenosis as compared to Bare-metal stent (BMS). At the same time, a number of clinical studies demonstrated dependence between strut endothelialization rate and rate of late stent thrombosis. Modern stent developers and manufacturers have limited number of materials for stent coating. So, it could be assumed that similar drug polymer formulation may yield similar biological effect and clinical results. Theoretically it could be assumed that similar drug polymer formulation may yield similar biological effect and clinical results and it is even possible to extrapolate clinical data from one stent model to the others (with same coating formulation). Methods and findings: We evaluated the biological response and endothelization rate of different DES with various drug-polymer formulation after implantation in rabbit iliac artery. Coating surface morphology of each stent was assessed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) at 14 and 28-day of implantation. Conclusions: It was found that DES with similar drug-polymer formulation but different morphology demonstrated different results after implantation. At the same time, DES with different coating formulation but similar morphology demonstrated similar biological effect. Thus, our study confirms that apart from coating formulation, coating morphology and topology are critical for stent biocompatibility and endothelization rate. Our future work will be devoted to detail in vivo study of influence of the rate of polymer coating degradation on vascular healing.