A little-known Food and Drug program is testing the latest medical technology to determine how safe and useful it can be. One cutting-edge experiment is designed to see if injecting certain drugs directly into diseased arteries works better than commonly used stents in keeping arteries clear. Dr. William Pritchard painstakingly threads a thin tube deep into his sedated patient’s beating heart. Then, in a radical move, he pushes a hair-sized needle out of the tube and deliberately punctures a crucial artery. But a pink snout beneath the sheets signals this is no ordinary operating room — or patient. Working on the pig are FDA (news - web sites) scientists. The agency is best known as the nation’s medical gatekeeper, approving the sale of new treatments rather than actually researching them. Indeed, proving that a therapy works well enough to sell is, by law, the job of the treatment’s official sponsor, usually the manufacturer.
