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A Conversation with Martin B. Leon, MD
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For this issue, Dr. Bhatt talks with Martin B. Leon, MD, professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, director of the Center for Interventional Vascular Therapy, director of the cardiac catheterization laboratories and a member of the executive board of the Columbia New York-Presbyterian Heart Valve Center, and founder and chairman emeritus of the Cardiovascular Research Foundation.
Leon completed his medical degree at Yale University School of Medicine, and his internship, residency and cardiology fellowship at Yale-New Haven Hospital. He has co-authored more than 1,550 publications, has performed more than 10,000 interventional procedures, and has served as principal investigator for more than 50 clinical trials that have helped shape the field of interventional cardiology.
Leon is director and founder of the annual Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) meeting and has served as director or co-director of more than 100 international educational programs in interventional cardiology.
What are your hobbies outside of practicing medicine?
Dr. Leon: I am a fanatical sports enthusiast, mainly these days as a spectator. I enjoy all sports, but especially team sports. I also love the theater and classical music, travel, history and archaeology.
What was the defining moment that led you to your field?
Dr. Leon: The defining moment for me was when my mother died at the relatively early age of 62 years, after complications associated with coronary bypass surgery. I made the decision at that point to shift my career focus from noninvasive cardiology to interventional cardiology, in an effort to find better ways to manage patients with vascular disease, without the need for open-heart surgery.
Martin B.
Leon
Deepak L.
Bhatt
What area of research in intervention interests you most right now and why?
Dr. Leon: For the first several decades of my career, we focused on vascular intervention. The niche of interventional cardiology was relegated to high-end plumbing. I would like to help direct interventional cardiology from this niche subspecialty into the mainstream of CVD. Anything that allows us to use less-invasive, catheter-based techniques to remotely treat non-vascular disease targets has been of great interest recently. A good example is the work we have done with transcatheter valve therapy, which has been enormously successful from every standpoint. We are now working in areas like atrial fibrillation, systemic hypertension, HF and stroke, as well as noncardiac diseases like diabetes and obesity. I think that there are a variety of interventional techniques that may have an impact on these mainstream important diseases.
Have you ever been fortunate enough to witness or to have been part of medical history in the making?
Dr. Leon: I felt that the work we did with bare-metal stents, which evolved into drug-eluting stents, was historic because it helped elevate the early work with balloon angioplasty and created the subspecialty of interventional cardiology. Results with stents were for the first time predictable and more definitive with reduced restenosis and fewer complications, and the techniques could be generalized to most operators. I would also argue that the recent work with transcatheter valve therapy has been of historic proportions. It opened up new treatment opportunities to desperately ill patients and encouraged a multi-disciplinary team approach to complex disease management. Importantly, very quickly, transcatheter aortic valve therapy has become accepted as part of the armamentarium of how we treat high-risk patients with aortic stenosis.
What is up next for you?
Dr. Leon: Hopefully more of the same. I like the fact that I can operate in many different arenas. I enjoy the academic part of my life at Columbia: mentoring fellows and junior faculty, trying to help develop the next generation of thought leaders. I also enjoy the clinical research and educational activities at CRF. Finally, I have an inventor side that needs to be nurtured. I work with engineers to help develop new devices and new transcatheter therapies. So, some combination of all of the above, with maybe a shift in the future to the more creative inventor role.