Every year, 1.3 million babies are born with congenital heart disease worldwide. One third of them need an artificial valve implant. These complex heart surgeries save hundreds of thousands of babies’ lives every year. But valve implants are not a perfect solution. New valves need to be implanted every few years, which requires multiple operations that have a deep impact on these children’s quality of life. In this episode of Vis A Vis, we discuss a pioneering technique currently being explored to improve operations on children’s hearts. This technique involves the creation of artificial heart valves that expand as the child’s heart grows, which will significantly cut down the number of operations a child has to undergo. This innovation is being developed by David Kalfa, Florence Irving Assistant Professor of Surgery and Director of the Pediatric Heart Valve Center at Columbia University; and Abdul Barakat, AXA Professor at the Hydrodynamics Laboratory at Ecole Polytechnique and co-Chair of Biomedical Engineering at Institut Polytechnique de Paris.
Listen on Your Preferred Platform
Abdul Barakat is CNRS Director of Research and the AXA Endowed Professor of Mechanics and Biology at Ecole Polytechnique in France. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Professor Barakat obtained a Ph.D. in biofluid mechanics from MIT in 1994. After a year as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago, he was recruited as Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Davis. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001 and to Full Professor in 2006. At UC Davis, he was also on the faculty of the Biomedical Engineering, Biophysics, and Applied Mathematics graduate programs. He relocated to France in 2010. In 2014, Prof. Barakat co-founded the startup company Sensome, which develops state-of-the-art sensors to equip medical devices. He is a recipient of a Pfizer-Parke Davis Atorvastatin Research Award, a permanently endowed Chair from the AXA Research Fund, and is an elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. His research interests are in biomedical engineering with specific focus on arterial fluid mechanics and mass transport, cellular mechanobiology, and endovascular devices.
Dr. David Kalfa is a Board-certified cardiothoracic surgeon with a subspecialization in pediatric cardiac surgery. A Native of France, Dr. Kalfa graduated from Marseilles University Graduate School of Medicine with the highest level of distinction in 2004. During his certification, he developed a research program in Tissue Engineering applied to the field of Congenital Heart Diseases that led to the attainment of numerous grants including a European Research FP7 Grant. He completed a research fellowship in Fondation Alain carpentier/INSERM in Paris and received his PhD degree in 2011 with the highest level of distinction. He then performed a 2-year clinical fellowship in Congenital Cardiovascular Surgery in one of the highest-volume centers (Marie Lannelongue Hospital in Paris) with exposure to highly complicated cases from all age groups (from neonates to adults). He completed a clinical fellowship in Adult Cardiac Surgery at Laval University Hospital in Quebec, Canada (2012-2013). He was then Assistant Attending in Congenital Cardiac Surgery at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital/NYP (2013-2015) and is currently Associate Professor of Surgery (tenure track) in the Section of Pediatric and Congenital Cardiac Surgery, Columbia University, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Surgery in the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Weill Cornell Medical College.
Credits
Host: Dr. Emmanuel Kattan
Editor and Producer: Monica Beatrice Hunter-Hart
Producer: Abdibasid Ali