How many grails do we need?

In a classic mixed metaphor of Greek and more recent continental lore, restenosis has been called the Achilles’ heel of interventional cardiology and the solution to restenosis has been called the holy grail. Restenosis itself has been the target of a multiplicity of initiatives, starting with trials of established drugs in the early 1980s, then moving more broadly to trials of many newer and different classes of drugs, and then finally to the application of a large number of widgets and gadgets. After initial promising animal trials and often small positive pilot human clinical experiences, larger scale randomized clinical trials were mounted only to fail the test of scientific trial design, the problems seemingly unmanageable.1