Singapore engineers invent soluble heart stent
Singapore engineers invent soluble heart stent
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 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, professor 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 commercialise the product from the Nanyang Technological University reasearchers 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.
The team also unveiled another invention -- a frictionless micro-pump that can be implanted in a patient's body to channel liquids into or away from certain organs.
The tiny pump, co-developed by the California Institute of Technology, can help cure diseases such as gangrene or pump out excess liquids from the lungs or brain.
The Singapore team is setting up a company in California to market the product and is receiving financial help from American biomedical company Orqis Medical. --AFP
str/kma/rcw AFPLifestyle-Singapore-health-heart AFP
GetAFP 2.10 -- APR 16, 2004 12:56:17