German medical device maker Biotronik touted early findings from a 1st-in-man study of its Dreams absorbable drug-eluting stent, with researchers reporting a mixed bag of findings for the device.
The Dreams stent proved safe at 1 year following the procedure, but wasn’t up to par with some rival devices, researchers noted.
"Further iterations of the device will need to be designed to improve efficacy," the authors wrote in the trial results, which were published the journal Lancet this month.
Researchers considered 46 patients with lesions in the coronary artery, reporting no deaths or scaffold-related thrombotic events at 12 months.
Rates of target lesion failure at 6 months were comparable to current drug-eluting stents, but weren’t as attractive as Abbott’s (NYSE:ABT) bioabsorbable stent, which is coated in a different drug.
Biotronik had also unveiled the 1-year results of the Biosolve-I 1st-in-man trial during the EuroPCR conference in Paris in May 2012. Among the findings were suggestions that patients’ targeted vessels had regains some of their natural physiology 6 months after treatment.
"These positive 1-year results confirm that we are working in the right direction," vascular intervention sales & marketing VP Alain Aimonetti said at the time. "We see huge potential for Dreams since it combines deployment and post-dilatation properties and long-term outcomes comparable to DES with the additional benefits of vascular restoration therapy."
