The day after the United States Food and Drug Administration approved a drug-releasing coronary stent designed to keep the artery unclogged, a UW Regional Heart Center team inserted this Cypher stent during a procedure April 25 at UW Medical Center.

The Cypher stent, which looks like a tiny, chain-link tunnel, has been available for nearly a year in many other countries.

The UW Medical Center interventional cardiologists used thin wires, narrow tubes, and a video monitor to guide the stent into place. They threaded the stent from a blood vessel in the groin and into the damaged heart vessel. The stent provides a scaffold for the blood vessel.

The Cypher stent is coated with a drug sirolimus, which inhibits cell division and thereby limits scar formation. Sirolimus leaches into the artery for about a month after the procedure.

Every year in the United States more than 5 million coronary artery disease patients undergo an unblocking procedure. About 200,000 are treated again within a year for re-blockage.

In a clinical trial of 1,400 patients, the drug-coated stent reduced the incidence of re-blockage by about two-thirds when compared to a standard metal stent. The manufacturer is Cordis, a division of Johnson & Johnson.

Performing the April 25 Cypher stent insertion, the first in the Seattle area, were Dr. Douglas Stewart, professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology and director of UW Medical Center’s Heart Cath Lab; Dr. Steven Goldberg, associate professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology; critical care nurse Max Kuttner; imaging technologist John Birks; and cardiovascular technologist Eithne Doran. Their patient was 43-year-old Sandra Donchess of Poulsbo, who has type 1 diabetes.

“I was in the right place at the right time,” said Donchess, who was alert and talking to UW Medical Center staff, faculty, and the media in a short time after the procedure.