A mechanistic model for drug release from PLGA-based drug eluting stent: A computational study

Atherosclerosis in the coronary artery is one of the leading causes of death in the world. The stenting as a minimally invasive technique was considered as an effective tool to reduce the severity of atherosclerotic stenosis. In-stent restenosis is the main drawback of the stenting in the coronary artery. Understanding the mechanism of drug release from drug-eluting stents and drug uptake in the arterial wall and obtaining more information about their functionality using mathematical modeling and numerical simulation, could be considered as a predictive tool to investigate in-stent restenosis growth which is experimentally expensive to study. In this work, the local delivery of a therapeutic agent from a PLGA-based bioabsorbable stent implanted in a coronary artery to predict the drug release as well as spatio-temporal drug distribution in a coronary artery with a vulnerable plaque is mathematically modeled and numerically simulated. The effect of copolymer ratio on drug release has been also investigated.