No matter the kind, scientists agree that a glass of red wine goes hand in hand with heart health. This is because red wine contains compounds called polyphenols, which reduce risk and slows progression of events in cardiovascular disease.
When studying these compounds, Tammy Dugas, professor at the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine, tried to find a direct method of heart disease treatment using polyphenols. While drinking win proved effective, delivering the polyphenols in the form of an oral supplement resulted in the exact opposite.
For Dugas, it was back to the drawing board. However, an FDA alert on drug eluting stents provided her with the answer.
“I thought, Oh, wait a minute, instead of developing a pill or a supplement, why don’t we deliver it to the artery, either on a stent or the balloon that we use to inflate the artery just before stent placement.”
Drug eluting stents are placed in arteries to deliver drugs to heart disease patients over a period of time. Dugas, alongside LSU professor Christina Sabliov, and a team of senior engineering students developed their very own polyphenol delivery drug eluting stent.
Although their study has produced two patents so far, Dugas says their work is far from over.
“All sorts of studies have to be done to evaluate safety what’s called probable efficacy to ever get to a human patient,” Dugas said.
“So the work that the students completed would next have to go into animals for safety assessment.”
A final product is years away from completion.  For now, the only goal for Dugas is to continually work on the product, which will one day provide a safer option to heart disease patients.
“We hope that one day it does culminate into a product that’s on the market, give clinicians more choices for how we treat patients.”