These days, Menlo Park, CA-based Xtent is enjoying being the drug-eluting stent company no one’s heard of. Yesterday the firm announced that it was moving forward with the latest configuration of its Custom NX Drug Eluting Stent system, as the technology has proved successful in Xtent’s ongoing Custom III clinical trial in Europe. And the company noted that its U.S. trial is on track to begin in the second half of 2007. Xtent is hoping that the Custom NX system’s personalized approach to arterial disease — based on a patient’s individual lesion characteristics, a physician can customize the stent length while inside the affected arteries — will help transform the current environment in which “stent” is practically a dirty word.