Emerging therapies in coronary balloon angioplasty, stenting, and bioabsorbable scaffolds

Abstract Mortality from coronary artery disease, the leading cause of death globally, has been on the decline. Percutaneous coronary intervention, performed for over 40 years, has been a major contributor to this favorable trend, together with advances in surgical revascularization, adjunctive pharmacotherapy and risk factor modification. In this chapter, we provide an overview of percutaneous coronary interventions, focusing on the iterative development of devices that have facilitated treatment of increasingly complex coronary lesions, lower complication rates and increase procedural success. We review emerging technologies in percutaneous coronary interventions with their specific applications and advantages, including specialty angioplasty balloons for modifying calcific and fibrotic lesions, novel drug-eluting stents with improves safety profile, deliverability and designs to treat bifurcations, bioresorbable scaffolds that hold the promise of restoring vessel architecture as well as robotic percutaneous coronary intervention to tackle operator radiation exposure and orthopedic injuries related to wearing protective aprons, and the emerging use of 3D printing.