They left the rest in place, allowed the animals to recover from the surgery, and then let them go about their lives for a month before killing them and collecting their stents for analysis.
As expected, even after eight hours, let alone a month, the uncoated and the polydopamine-coated stents were saturated in cell growth triggered by immune activity.
To that end they picked a group of rabbits and implanted into their abdominal aortas stents which had no coating, stents coated only in polydopamine, and stents which had also had platelet membranes attached to them.