A Drug Coated Stent to Clear the Economic Arteries

J&J Stops Making Drug-Coated Heart Stents Amid Falling Sales - Bloomberg: "Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) plans to leave the market for the drug-coated heart stents it pioneered, in a restructuring that will close two factories and cut as many as 1,000 jobs.
The manufacture of Cypher and Cypher Select Plus stents and development of a new model will end this year, the New Brunswick, New Jersey-based company said in a statement today. Boston Scientific Corp. (BSX), the current stent market leader, rose 2.8 percent in New York trading.
J&J, once the world’s leading maker of the artery-clearing devices, has lost ground to Boston Scientific and Abbott Laboratories (ABT) in a $4 billion-a-year global stent market where competition has dragged down prices, said Jeff Jonas, an analyst in Rye, New York, with Gabelli & Co. Inc., which owns J&J shares. J&J suspended a clinical trial last year for its proposed next-generation model, Nevo, after difficulties with a catheter used to insert the device in patients."