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Conor Medsystems Presents Preliminary Results from COSTAR I Drug Eluting Stent Trial

Menlo Park, CA, September 27, 2004 - Conor Medsystems, Inc. today announced preliminary results from its COSTAR I clinical trial at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) meeting in Washington, D.C. The COSTAR I study, planned to include up to 130 patients, is designed to evaluate the safety and performance of four formulations of paclitaxel loaded on Conor's COSTAR cobalt chromium stent. The principal investigator for this study is Upendra Kaul, M.D., of the Batra Hospital and Medical Research Center in New Delhi.

The initial results are for one of the four formulations, a 10mcg dose (per 17 millimeter stent) released over approximately 30 days. A total of 57 lesions were treated in 40 individuals from a complex patient population. More than 50 percent of the patients had a prior myocardial infarction, or heart attack, and 28 percent were diabetic. Other complex characteristics of the patient group included small diameter coronary vessels and long lesions, with an average reference vessel diameter of 2.46 millimeters and an average stent length of 22.3 millimeters.

At four-month follow-up, the in-stent binary restenosis rate for this group of patients was 1.9 percent. For lesions treated with a single stent, the in-stent angiographic late loss was 0.40 millimeters, and the in-segment late loss was 0.21 millimeters. The volume obstruction by intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) was 7.1 percent, and the target lesion revascularization (TLR) rate was 1.8 percent.

Conor Medsystems, Inc., develops innovative controlled vascular drug delivery technologies. Conor has initially focused on the development of drug eluting stents to treat coronary artery disease. Conor's stent design incorporates hundreds of small holes, each acting as a reservoir into which drug-polymer compositions can be loaded.