Kissing vanishing stents: Are we trading ephemeral benefit for permanent damage?

Bioresorbable scaffolds are the next upcoming development in interventional cardiology. Fully bioresorbable stents have been tested for more than 20 years but only in the last few months do we finally have devices with biocompatibility and mechanical performance in in vitro, animal, and early clinical trials to justify commercial release. Most of the experience is with the Abbott Absorb scaffold (Abbott Vascular, Santa Clara, CA, USA). As expected from first-in-man trials of revolutionary new devices, the initial experience with bioresorbable scaffolds started in short simple lesions. The time has come for practitioners to develop strategies to apply these devices in ...