Tailor-made stents for airways will help desperate patients breathe more easily
Researchers in Toulouse have developed custom-made silicone stents to open up blocked airways in patients with breathing problems, offering hope to people for whom conventional stents fail. The prostheses are anatomically identical to the patients’ own tracheae or bronchi, and are an example of how personalised medicine is making inroads into the medical device arena, said Julien Mazières, an oncologist-pulmonologist working with a team at Toulouse University Hospital that developed the tailor-made implants in collaboration with the Toulouse-based start-up firm Anatomik Modeling. "Every person could [ultimately] have their own stent, even if it is not a complicated case. It would be better than what is commercially available [at present]," said Mazières. While standard stents are suitable for most patients with narrowing of their large airways, the devices fail in a significant minority of patients who have had lung transplants, tracheotomies or have tracheal diseases. Standard sten...
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