The Texas Heart Institute

He's a native Texan.

He's the founder and director of the Texas Heart Institute.

He's published over 1,200 articles, four or five books or more.

He's the subject of at least two other books that I've read.

Yes.

Well, the...

I wanted to ask you about numbers, because the Texas Heart Institute has the most numbers of anybody.

I want to be sure I know.

So over the years, our paradigm for the management of these complications has changed in one way and the other.

So the early studies from the late 1960s from Denton Cooley at Texas Heart replacing doing ventricular septal rupture, they clearly recognize it as innate complication of shock.

But that was simply because I think the early patients were all dying, and this was a survival of the fittest, and those were the patients that they then operated on.

And so that really brought up the issue of whether we should wait for patients to have this complication, because a lot of people were dying even before they had surgery.

Yeah, yeah.

So my first job kind of out of school was really, you know, in the hallowed halls of Texas Heart Institute, you know, where Denton Cooley and, you know, huge, huge names like that that are so important to, you know, the history of kind of cardiac medical technologies in particular were developed.

And I worked for an electrophysiologist by the He's a serial innovator and serial inventor and, you know, worked developing technologies in his lab and really fell in love with the concept of working on a medical device.

I think some of the reason I ended up in med device and not say biotech or or pharma or something else, you know, was I was impatient, you know, impatient to get to impact medicine.

Like the interesting thing about medical technology is you could build something today that could be in a patient in three to five years, you know.

And that piece really, really resonated with me.

So went to Texas Heart Institute, helped spin out a company called Saronis and the kind of interventional.

cardiology vascular space, ran product development there in my 20s, which I don't know if I had any business doing or not, but the company made it all the way through patients and so on and ultimately was acquired, which was great.

So over the years, our paradigm for the management of these complications has changed in one way and the other.

So the early studies from the late 1960s from Denton Cooley at Texas Heart replacing, doing ventriculoseptal rupture, they clearly recognized it as a late complication of shock, but that was simply because I think the early patients were all dying, and this was a survival of the fittest, and those were the patients that they then operated on.

And so that really brought up the issue of whether we should wait for patients to have this complication because a lot of people were dying even before they had surgery.

And so prior guidelines really recommended immediate correction of a mechanical defect as soon as it was diagnosed.