Drug-eluting stents inhibit endothelial cells, which are crucial for preventing blood clotting around the stent.

“So what people realized was in the process of inhibiting these cells, these smooth muscle cells and other cells that make the scar tissue, we're also inhibiting the endothelial cells. So one of the things that happens if you take a patient who has a stent and that patient, say, dies in a car accident, you look under the microscope pathologically, you'll see that that stent is now covered with endothelial cells after about three weeks. And it's the endothelial cells that prevent the blood clotting.”