Health Canada has approved Abbott’s Absorb bioresorbable heart stent, making the device commercially available to treat people in Canada with coronary artery disease.
According to a company release, Absorb is the only dissolving heart stent approved for the treatment of coronary artery disease.
The stent is made of a naturally dissolving material, similar to dissolving sutures. Absorb disappears completely in approximately three years.
“The Absorb stent is a significant advance in the way that coronary artery disease can be treated,” says Philippe L-L’Allier, director of interventional cardiology at Montreal Heart Institute (Montreal, Canada. “Its novel technology means that once the stent has dissolved, the treated artery can pulse and flex as demands on the heart change with everyday activities. It also means physicians can more easily offer their patients other treatment options if necessary in a patient’s future.”
With Health Canada’s approval of the Absorb bioresorbable stent, Abbott plans to offer the innovative device to Canadian hospitals nationwide, starting this summer.
In clinical studies, the Absorb bioresorbable stent has demonstrated comparable short-term and mid-term outcomes to the leading metallic stent—Abbott’s Xience drug eluting stent. At one year in a pre-specified group of approximately 2,000 US patients in the pivotal ABSORB III randomised clinical trial, patients who received the dissolving Absorb stent experienced comparable rates of specific adverse events in the intended patient population (reference vessel diameter of ≥2.5mm and ≤3.75mm)—including heart disease-related death, heart attacks attributed to the stented artery and repeat procedures at the treated lesion (collectively termed target lesion failure)—as compared to patients who received the metallic Xience stent.
