CBSET, a non-for-profit preclinical research institute dedicated to biomedical research, education and advancement of medical technologies, announced today that its scientists have published data and analyses (“Sex differences in the outcomes of stent implantation in mini-swine model”) that “illustrate differences in the dynamic healing responses of male and female pigs to stent implantation in single and overlapped configurations.” The study is published online by the multidisciplinary and Open Source journal PLOS ONE.

“Animals are ideal models for testing specific hypotheses that drive vascular disease. In fact, much of what we know of vascular biology is derived from animal work. Over the years we have used male and female animals to evaluate a large range of endovascular stents yet, in retrospect, none of these individual studies was sufficiently powered to capture sex-dependent effects,” said Peter Markham, MS, President and CEO of CBSET and co-senior author of the article. “It is only when we pooled years of data that we were able to find sex-related differences in vascular responses to stent implantation.”

“The accentuation of sex-dependent differences in vascular responses at six months and one year are intriguing given the consideration of erodible scaffolds, and even non-implantable endovascular therapies such as drug-coated balloons. Time will tell if our findings in juvenile pigs extend to the clinical setting, yet already they provide context for preclinical safety studies and illustrate how more-refined animal models might shed light on sex dependent vascular responses in humans,” said Elazer Edelman, MD, PhD, chairman and co-founder of CBSET, and co-senior author of the paper… Continue reading.