Stent makers are expected to lose $1 billion market share, and are already cutting thousands of jobs, due to safety questions regarding drug eluting stents.
Fellow Piper Jaffray analyst Timothy Nelson and Millennium Research Group stent analyst Bina Mistry both said in interviews that they project the U.S. drug-coated stent market to shrink from about $2.9 billion last year to roughly $2 billion this year. They haven’t done projections on the global decline.
It’s been a quick turnaround for a market that emerged after J&J introduced the first U.S. drug-coated stent in 2003, and Boston Scientific followed with its own the next year.
The devices quickly surpassed sales of older and less expensive bare-metal versions. The older stents left many angioplasty patients needing repeat procedures to reopen vessels clogged by scar tissue from the first surgery. Newer models’ drug coating is designed to prevent such blockages.
The U.S. market peaked at $3.1 billion in 2005, when the global market hit $5.2 billion, according to Toronto-based Millennium, which surveys hospitals performing artery-opening surgery called angioplasty. In about four years, some six million people worldwide were implanted, a modern record for medical devices.
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