The Stent Study
It's one small step for the pharma companies but one giant leap for the future of cardiovascular care.

We thought we had an uphill struggle on our hands to motivate the medical community and drug/device manufacturers to work together to recreate the success of the past. We thought that we would be harping back to halcyon days of collaborations in this section of myPHID, but we are delighted to be completely wrong!

In an unprecedented move, eight pharmaceutical and device companies have confirmed that they will collaborate in a $100 million study that will determine the best way to protect heart patients from dangerous clots that can form after implantation of a heart stent.

The companies collaborating are:
Abbott Laboratories Inc.
Boston Scientific Corporation
Bristol-Myers Squibb Company
Daiichi Sankyo
Eli Lilly & Company
Johnson & Johnson
Medtronic Inc.
Sanofi Aventis SA.

The study will take four years and include 20,000 patients. The primary aim is to agree whether patients with a stent stop taking aggressive blood-thinning agents after one year (this is the current guideline mandate for drug-coated stents), or if they should remain on pharmacological supplementation for a minimum of two and a half years from implantation.

The potentially lethal consequences of a clot formation after stent implantation has been of great concern for patients and their doctors for a long time and so far no-one was prepared to consider what course of treatment is/isn't the most valuable.

This 'great collaboration' will shed much-needed light on the issues to alleviate anxieties. It was requested by the FDA and myPHID would like to commend Bram Zuckerman at the organization who worked tirelessly to initiate the study. Laura Mauri, a cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital—Boston, Massachusetts and chief scientific officer at Harvard Clinical Research Institute will be the co-principal investigator for the study.

myPHID have approached Dr Zuckerman, Professor Mauri and the eight companies involved in the study to give advice and experience of how to bring such collaborations as these to fruition - watch this space for an update and interviews.