A Trial of Everolimus-eluting Stents and Paclitaxel-eluting Stents for Coronary Revascularization in Daily Practice: The COMPARE Trial

Instead of treating in-stent restenosis, the best strategy for patients is preventing in-stent restenosis. Recent advances in the understanding of the cellular mechanism responsible for smooth muscle cell proliferation (neointimal hyperplasia), together with improvement in stent coating and eluting technology have provided the scientific background to develop drug eluting stents. Drug eluting stents (DES) are now the most promising development in interventional cardiology. Different classes of drugs mounted in a polymer layer on the surface of the stent have shown to be very effective in preventing neointimal hyperplasia. Currently there are 7 DES stents CE marked and commercially available on the market. Two stents, respectively the sirolimus eluting Cypher™ stent and the paclitaxel eluting Taxus™ stent, are in clinical use since 2002. The Cypher™ stent consists of the Bx sonic stent/balloon platform. The stent is coated with a non-degradable biocompatible PBMA/PEVA polymer which elutes sirolimius. The Taxus™ stent consists of the Express2 balloon/stent platform coated with non-degradable biocompatible Translute™ polymer which elutes paclitaxel. Recent large randomized trials like RAVEL, SIRIUS, E-SIRIUS C-SIRIUS (Cypher™ versus bare metal BX sonic™ stent), TAXUS II, IV, V, VI (Taxus versus bare metal Express™ stent) have shown that DES dramatically reduce the incidence of in-stent restenosis and subsequently the need for target lesion revascularization in patients with non complex and moderate long de-novo coronary lesions in vessels with a diameter between 2.5 -3.5 mm.1-11 Considering the very encouraging results of these early clinical trials with so far mid long term follow-up, there is the need to explore the utilization of DES in the other subsets of coronary lesions like: long lesions, chronic total occlusions, venous graft lesions, thrombotic lesions, restenosis lesions, ostial and bifurcation lesions and lesions in large vessels. As the result from the p