Assessment of mechanical integrity for drug-eluting renal stent with micro-sized drug reservoirs

The drug-eluting stent (DES) has become the gold standard worldwide for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. In recent years, an innovative variation of the DES with micro-sized drug reservoirs has been introduced. It allows programmable drug delivery with both spatial and temporal control and has several potential advantages over traditional DESs. However, creating such reservoirs on the stent struts may weaken the structure of the stent scaffolding and compromise its mechanical integrity. In this study, we propose to use this innovative stent concept in the renal indication for potential treatment of both renal artery stenosis (upstream) and its associated kidney diseases (downstream) at the same time. The effects of these micro-sized drug reservoirs on several key clinically relevant functional attributes of the drug-eluting renal stent were systematically and quantitatively investigated. Finite element models were developed to predict the mechanical integrity of a balloon-expandable stent at various stages. Results show that (1) creating drug reservoirs on a stent could impact the stent fatigue resistance to certain degrees; (2) drug reservoirs on the stent crowns lead to greater loss in all key stent attributes than reservoirs on either bar arms or connectors and (3) the proposed optimised depot stent was proven to be feasible and could triple drug capacity than the current DESs, with marginal trade-off in its key clinical attributes. These results can serve as the guidelines to help future stent designs to achieve the best combination of stent structural integrity and smart drug delivery in the future.