Medical implants are used for a number of medical purposes, including the reinforcement of recently re-enlarged lumens, the replacement of ruptured vessels, and the treatment of disease such as vascular disease by local pharmacotherapy, i.e., delivering therapeutic drug doses to target tissues while minimizing systemic side effects. Such localized delivery of therapeutic agents has been achieved using medical implants which both support a lumen within a patient's body and place appropriate coatings containing absorbable therapeutic agents at the implant location. Examples of such medical devices include catheters, guide wires, balloons, filters (e.g., vena cava filters), stents, stent grafts, vascular grafts, intraluminal paving systems, implants and other devices used in connection with drug-loaded polymer coatings. Such medical devices are implanted or otherwise utilized in body lumina and organs such as the coronary vasculature, esophagus, trachea, colon, biliary tract, urinary tract, prostate, brain, and the like.
The process of applying a coating onto a stent may be accomplished by a number of methods including spray coating, spin-coating, and electrostatic deposition. The spray-coating method has been frequently used because of its excellent features, e.g., good efficiency and control over the amount or thickness of coating. However, the conventional spray-coating methods, which are usually implemented with a device such as an airbrush, have drawbacks. For example, when a medical device has a structure such that a portion of the device obstructs sprayed droplets from reaching another portion of the device, then the coating becomes uneven. Specifically, when a spray-coating is employed to coat a stent having a tube-like structure with openings, such as stents described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,655,771 and 4,954,126 to Wallsten, the coating on the inner wall of the tube-like structure tends to be thinner than that applied to the outer wall of the tube-like structure. Hence, conventional spraying methods tend to produce coated stents with coatings that are not uniform. Furthermore, conventional spraying methods are inefficient. In particular, generally only 5% of the coating solution that is sprayed to coat the medical device is actually deposited on the surface of the medical device. The majority of the sprayed coating solution is therefore wasted.
In the so-called spin-dipping process, a medical device is coupled to a spinning device, and then, while rotating about a central axis, the medical device is dipped into a coating solution to achieve the desired coating. This process also suffers from many inefficiencies including the unevenness of the coated layer and a lack of control over the coated layer's thickness.
In addition to the spray coating and spin-dipping methods, the electrostatic deposition method has been suggested for coating medical devices. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,824,049 and 6,096,070 to Ragheb et al. mention the use of electrostatic deposition to coat a medical device with a bioactive material. In the conventional electrodeposition or electrostatic spraying method, a surface of the medical device is grounded and a gas may be used to atomize the coating solution into droplets. The droplets are then electrically charged using, for example, corona discharge, i.e., the atomized droplets are electrically charged by passing through a corona field. Since the droplets are charged, when they are applied to the surface of the medical device, they will be attracted to the surface since it is grounded.
One disadvantage of conventional electrostatic spraying is that it requires a complicated spraying apparatus. In addition, because the conventional electrostatic systems use a gas to move the droplets from a source to a target, controlling the gas pressure is crucial for accurate coating. However, it is not easy to control the gas pressure so that the target surface is evenly and sufficiently coated without losing much of the coating solution.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved method for coating medical devices that provides even and uniform coatings over the entire surface that is to be coated. Each of the references cited herein is incorporated by reference herein for background information.