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One of the excellent projects in the portfolio, from the biomaterials portfolio, is from Resbio,
which is one of our biotechnology research and development centers. Resbio’s goal is
to develop—to use advanced scientific and engineering processes to develop new biomaterials
for biomedical applications. And this process is predicated on the notion that someone comes
to them with a biomaterials need and they synthesize the candidate polymer from within
their vast libraries and then characterize that polymer based on physical properties
and computational processes. And through an iterative cycle the end result is a new biomaterial
that they can then test for further development. And one of the great examples of this has
been the development of a new cardiovascular stent. So it has all the properties we’ve
come to expect from stents and it has some novel features which are that it is biodegradable
by a very controlled degradation process and it’s also radio-opaque so that we can image
it and monitor the degradation process as it proceeds when the stent is no longer needed.
In 2002, Reva Medical came to us with a brand new stent design but they were also looking
for a new polymer, a resorbable polymer that could replace the commonly used metals.
Metal stents have the disadvantage that they remain in the body of the patient for life
and they can cause long term complications. Stents have completely changed the way we
treat coronary vessel disease. Stents are an amazing breakthrough.
Stents are tiny, but they have to be strong enough to withhold the forces generated by
the flow of blood. They also have to deliver drugs into the vessel and at the end they
have to safely resorb into the body of the patients. All of these requirements make the
stent one of the most difficult medical devices to design.
NIH grants allowed us to design polymer libraries using combinatorial methods that allowed us
to home in on a set of promising polymers for the Reva stent in a process that took
us months instead of years. Reva’s drug eluting stent has already created
hundreds of jobs but more importantly, it will change the way in which we treat coronary
vessel disease. The Reva stent is today in clinical trials
and we are very optimistic that it will lead to improved outcomes for our patients.