Stent

A stent is a tube, typically made of a metal alloy or a polymer, inserted into a blood vessel or another duct in the body to hold the passageway open, most familiarly as a coronary stent used during angioplasty to keep a narrowed artery from closing again. The device takes its name from Charles Thomas Stent, a nineteenth-century English dentist whose denture-making compound a Dutch plastic surgeon later adapted to medical use; the American radiologist Julio Palmaz developed a balloon-expandable design, the Swiss cardiologist Hans Wallsten invented a self-expanding version called the Wallstent, and the French physicians Jacques Puel and Ulrich Sigwart implanted the first coronary stents in patients in Toulouse in 1986. Cesare Gianturco and Gary Roubin's Flex-Stent became the first stent approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration in 1993, and drug-eluting stents, coated to further reduce the renarrowing of treated arteries, were introduced in 2003.