Abbott heart stent gets approval for sale in Japan

LIBERTYVILLE TOWNSHIP - The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare in Japan has approved Abbott Laboratories' Absorb bioresorbable heart stent, making the first-of-its-kind medical device commercially available to treat people in Japan with coronary artery disease.

Absorb is a fully dissolving heart stent developed for the treatment of heart disease.

"Absorb has the potential to address the unsolved challenges of managing coronary artery disease with conventional drug eluting metallic stents," said Professor Takeshi Kimura, M.D., Ph.D., director of cardiovascular medicine at Kyoto University Hospital in Japan. "Our research, which involved 400 patients at 38 Japanese sites, shows that this fully dissolving stent delivered comparable results to the best-in-class Abbott Xience metallic drug-eluting stent on clinically important measures of safety and efficacy."

Japan ranks as the second-largest single-country market for advanced medical technology behind the United States, where the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Absorb in July 2016.