**1. Introduction**

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Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the foremost cause of morbidity in the worlds industrialised nations. Consequently our ability in understanding the treatments available and the mechanisms of their success/failure is of particular importance as we strive to improve procedural success rates through the evolution of existing and the innovation of new interventional technologies. Today, the gold standard for treating CAD is to deploy a drug eluting stent (DES) in the blocked artery to first restore luminal blood flow and second to resist the body's tendency to block the artery once more through its overly aggressive healing response known as restenosis. Intrinsically, the understanding of mass transport is elemental to all aspects of DES design from the type of drug used and the polymer release characteristics to the shape and thickness of the stent struts. Design optimisation of DES is vital to achieving increases in procedural success rates as the technology evolves, as is the case for its newest embodiment, the biodegradable DES.

This chapter addresses issues fundamental to drug mass transport from DES, starting with an overview of CAD and associated interventional procedures. DES mass transport theory is then presented and followed by accounts of mass transport problem classifications employed by researchers under a number of deployment scenarios. The importance of experimental mass transport validation is highlighted and a computational investigation is developed to demonstrate how differences in DES deployment conditions alter drug concentrations in the artery wall.
