Singapore engineers invent soluble heart stent

Singapore engineers invent soluble heart stent

Agence France-Presse, Singapore

Singapore engineers have invented a soluble heart stent that can hold up to 20 layers of drugs, a world first that will speed up patient recoveries and lower the chances of relapses, media reports said on Friday.

The combination of drugs held by the stent, a tiny tube inserted into the clogged vessels of heart patients to keep them open, can be tailored for each patient, one of the inventors, Prof. Freddy Boey told the Straits Times.

The drugs can be released into the body at different times, and the stent dissolves in the patient's body after its job is done.

The main materials used to make the stent are PLA and PLGA polymers, which have been approved for insertion into human bodies by the United States Food and Drug Administration, the paper said.

These plastics turn into lactic acid in the body and can then be absorbed into the blood stream.

Previous models of stents could only hold one drug and were made of metal, leaving a foreign object permanently lodged inside the body, the paper said.

A multinational company, one of the world's biggest manufacturer of heart stents, has bought the rights to test and commercialize the product from the Nanyang Technological University researchers who invented it.

However the Straits Times said the device will only be available on the market in five years, as it still needs to be rigorously tested before being certified safe for use in humans.

The engineering team is not allowed to reveal the name of the company that bought the rights, although the Straits Times said it was believed to be U.S. giant Johnson and Johnson.