Often those of us who’ve concentrated on IT, health delivery and pharmaceuticals forget the huge amounts spend on medical devices.  Some of those medical devices are very expensive and in some the technological arms race is faster and has as much impact as that in the pharmaceutical approval war.  The battle over coronary stents–tiny tubes that keep blood vessels open after angioplasty– has become bigger and bigger over the past few years. This is notwithstanding the opinion of a Canadian health services researcher I met a few years back who’s research "proved" that they had no real incremental value over straight angioplasty. But then we never cared about health services research or Canadians!

The latest development in stents is coating them with drugs to prevent scar tissue building up around them and necessitating more surgery. J&J’s market leading Cypher stent has it and as does Boston Scientific’s new market entry Taxus (selling in Europe and looking likely to be approved later this year for the US). The news that Taxus’ approval was in the offing led Boston Scientific’s share price to jump even after a big rise already this year.

The stent market has been an ongoing battle, as this Businessweek article shows, for many years, and now is a $5 billion worldwide market–split usually between J&J, Boston Scientific and Guidant.  Who gains and loses the lead in market share changes over the years depending on who has the latest gizmo, and who’s sales staff impresses the surgeons the most. But the combination of drugs and devices is a trend that is going to have staying power.