Once hailed as a sure-fire device against clogging, the drug-coated stents have steadily come down in popularity charts. Their sales have nosedived, hitting hard the finances of the device makers.
Johnson & Johnson is cutting nearly 5,000 jobs due in part to a stent decline after studies questioned the devices' safety and effectiveness in preventing heart attacks and bypass surgery. Boston Scientific is preparing its own cuts after its stock hit a five-year low and its credit rating sank below junk-bond status.
The industry hopes to resurrect the market by rolling out next-generation versions of stents, metal-mesh tubes about the size of an ink pen spring that unfold inside coronary arteries like a scaffold. Although the new stents are designed to be safer and more effective, industry analysts don't expect a quick turnaround.
"I'm not going to be so bold as to call this the bottom in the market yet, but we're close, in this country," said Thom Gunderson, a Piper Jaffray analyst. "I think in three or four quarters going forward, you'll see a rebound."
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.