Boston Scientific has released a three-year follow-up data from the Horizons-AMI trial designed to determine the safety and efficacy of the Taxus Express2 Paclitaxel-Eluting Coronary Stent System compared to bare-metal stenting in patients experiencing an acute myocardial infarction (AMI), or heart attack.

Horizons-AMI trial was sponsored by the Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF) with grant support from Boston Scientific and The Medicines Company.

Horizons-AMI is a randomised trial to compare the use of drug-eluting stents to bare-metal stents for AMI patients.

Analysis of the data was presented by professor of Medicine and the director of Research and Education at the Center for Interventional Vascular Therapy at the Columbia University Medical Center/New York-Presbyterian Hospital and principal investigator of the trial Gregg Stone at CRF’s annual Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics scientific symposium in Washington, DC.

Stone said that the follow-up from the Horizons-AMI trial continue to show that, in patients with AMI, paclitaxel-eluting stents were superior in efficacy to bare-metal stents and had a comparable safety profile.

“Significant reductions in measures of re-intervention at three years were observed with no evidence of late catch-up,” Stone said.

Taxus Express Stent was shown to reduce clinical and angiographic restenosis compared to an otherwise identical bare-metal Express control stent, in Horizons-AMI trial.

After three years follow-up, the primary efficacy endpoint of ischemia-driven target lesion revascularisation (TLR) was 9.4% for patients treated with Taxus Express vs 15.1% for bare-metal Express, a relative reduction of 40%.

The secondary efficacy endpoint of ischemia-driven target vessel revascularisation (TVR) was 12.4% for Taxus Express vs 17.6% for bare-metal Express, a relative reduction of 32%.

Boston Scientific Cardiology, Rhythm and Vascular Group senior vice president and chief medical officer Keith Dawkins said that the results from the Horizons-AMI trial continue to show the impressive benefits of paclitaxel-eluting stent technology in this important high-risk AMI patient population.