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

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GetAFP 2.10 -- APR 16, 2004 12:56:17