On the role of phase change in modelling drug-eluting stents

A model of drug release from an eluting stent to the arterial wall is presented. The coating layer is described as a porous reservoir where the drug is initially loaded in a polymer-encapsulated solid phase, and is then released both to the coating and to the tissue of the arterial wall in a free phase. The wall is treated as a heterogeneous porous medium and the drug transfer through it is modeled by a non-homogeneous set of coupled partial differential equations that describe a convection-diffusion-reaction process. Change of phases due to drug dissolution in the coating and binding-unbinding reactions in the arterial wall are addressed. Numerical results show a strong coupling of the release kinetics in the polymer and the drug dynamics in the wall, and this coupling depends on the physico-chemical drug properties, the microstructure of the polymeric stent coating and the properties of the arterial wall.