Abbott stents show promise in key testing

WASHINGTON -- Abbott Laboratories' experimental heart stents may threaten the market dominance of Boston Scientific Corp. and Johnson & Johnson, based on positive results from two studies released Saturday.

Abbott's Xience, a drug-coated stent marketed in Europe, was found to be superior to Boston Scientific's Taxus in keeping treated blood vessels open -- a finding that may help propel the device to US approval next year. Separately, a new stent made by Abbott that dissolves in arteries after about three years scored promising results in its first human trial.

The two studies, presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology in New Orleans, position Xience at the front edge of new technology in the $5.4 billion-a-year drug-coated stent market.

"The data really couldn't look any better," said Michael Weinstein, an analyst at J.P. Morgan Securities Inc., in an e-mail Saturday. The fact they significantly reduce major cardiovascular complications, something never before seen in a major trial of drug-coated stents, "is powerful," he said.

Investors and analysts were already expecting the Xience stent to capture 25 to 30 percent of the market, and Weinstein said those estimates may be adjusted upward today. US approval for Xience is expected in the first half of 2008.

Stents are mesh tubes placed in arteries to keep them from re-closing after angioplasty, a procedure in which a balloon-tipped catheter is inflated to reopen a clogged blood vessel.

Separately, Boston Scientific Corp. yesterday disclosed two-year results from the Taxus V In-Stent Restenosis trial, demonstrating that the Taxus Axus Express2 paclitaxel-eluting coronary stent system met its primary endpoint in the treatment of in-stent restenosis -- the regrowth of diseased tissue into a previously stented artery using bare-metal stents -- compared to vascular brachytherapy.

The company's disclosure was also made at the New Orleans cardiology conference.

The study showed that compared with brachytherapy, the placement of small radioactive pellets inside the vessel and the only currently approved treatment for in-stent restenosis, the Taxus stent reduced the overall rate of target vessel revascularization at two years from 27.5 percent to 18.1 percent.