Study: Stents From Abbott, Boston Scientific Work Equally

Abbott Laboratories’ Xience and Boston Scientific Corp.’s Taxus Liberte, the newest entrants in the $1.9 billion US market for heart stents, dueled to a tie in a study of heart attack victims.

The two stents did equally well at restoring blood flow to the heart and preventing future heart attacks, researchers said at a Washington, DC, medical conference. There were more deaths among Xience patients during the procedure to clear arteries, though the difference may have stemmed from chance.

The results are another boost for Abbott Park, IL- based Abbott, whose Xience stent has been gaining ground on rivals since it was approved for sale July 2. Boston Scientific’s Liberte, cleared on Oct. 10, will need to prove superior in new human trials to expand market share, said Philip Nalbone, an RBC Capital Markets analyst in San Francisco, CA.

Otherwise, Liberte “won’t make a difference,” Nalbone said in an interview before the study was released.

Stents are metal tubes that prop open an artery after it’s cleared of fatty deposits called plaque. Newer versions of the $2,000 devices are coated with drugs to prevent scar tissue that can reblock the blood vessel.

The newly approved Liberte joins Xience, Medtronic Inc.’s Endeavor and Johnson & Johnson’s Cypher in an increasingly crowded market. Boston Scientific, based in Natick, MA, also sells a version of Xience called Promus under a licensing deal that gives Abbott 40% of profit.

In other results, a combined analysis of two previous Abbott studies known as Spirit II and Spirit III found the company’s Xience was superior to Boston Scientific’s older stent called the Taxus Express. The benefit from Xience increased with time, said researcher Gregg Stone, professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and chairman of the Cardiovascular Research Foundation. 

After two years, patients getting Xience were significantly less likely to have died or had a heart attack than those treated with the Taxus Express device, the study found. Xience patients also were less likely to need repeat procedures to clear their arteries, Stone said.

For every 1,000 patients given Xience instead of the older Taxus stent, there were 25 fewer heart attacks and deaths in the study, said John Capek, head of medical devices at Abbott. Currently, about 70,000 Americans get stents each month, he said.

Market Share

Since debuting in July, Xience and Promus have captured 40% of the U.S. stent market, said Rick Wise, a Leerink Swann & Co. analyst, citing a survey of cardiologists. The number is likely to rise to 50% by next July, with Abbott’s version claiming almost three-quarters of sales, Wise wrote.

Doctors predicted Boston’s Taxus line of stents will stay steady at 29% over the next year, even with Liberte.

In the new study of 335 heart attack victims, 3.2% of Xience patients died within a month compared with 1.3% of patients getting Taxus Liberte, the European market leader in 2007, according to researchers at Rotterdam’s Medical Centre Rijnmond-South. Of the 185 patients who completed six months of the study, the figures were 6.9% and 2.3%, respectively. The difference may have stemmed from chance due to the small size of the study, which will continue for a year.

Study Called Compare

The research, funded by the hospital and called Compare, was presented at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics conference. The deaths occurred in the hospital during treatment of clogged arteries and weren’t caused by the devices, according to a summary of the findings provided by the conference organizers.

The study results may at least help halt Boston Scientific’s slide in sales, said Spencer Nam, a Summer Street Research Partners analyst.

“Any study where Taxus ties or is maybe even better than Xience, it’s a win for Boston right now,” Nam said. “They need anything they can get to throw at customers and say, ‘You shouldn’t throw away Taxus.”’

Drug-coated stents accounted for 35% of Boston Scientific’s $2.02 billion in revenue in the second quarter this year. They generated 3% of Abbott’s $7.3 billion quarterly income.

SOURCE: Bloomberg