Bioresorbable vascular scaffold in patients with complex coronary artery disease

The advent of fully bioresorbable stent technology is heralded as breakthrough technology in the current era of percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI). Bioresorbable scaffolds (BRS) have the potential to introduce a paradigm shift in interventional cardiology, representing an anatomical and functional "vascular restoration" therapy instead of an artificial stiff tube encased by persistent metallic foreign body. Among BRS, the everolimus-eluting scaffold (ABSORB, Abbott Vascular, Santa Clara, CA, USA) has been the most extensively investigated in clinical studies. The use of ABSORB in the treatment of relatively simple lesions appears to provide a similar degree of safety and efficacy compared with metallic drug-eluting stent (DES) treated under randomized trials conditions, but patients treated in real-world practice are far more complex than those included in randomized trials. Therefore, several ABSORB all-comers registries dealing with real world conditions are being performed. Their currently available results are summarized in the present overview.