Chief Medical Officer, Vice President Structural Heart, Cardiac Surgery and Mechanical Circulatory support of Medtronic, The Netherlands
Chief Medical Officer, Vice President Structural Heart, Cardiac Surgery and Mechanical Circulatory support of Medtronic, The Netherlands
Pieter Kappetein, MD, PhD, is a Consultant Cardiothoracic Surgeon, is Professor at the Thoraxcenter at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Before he joined Medtronic as Chief Medical Officer and Vice-President, he was Secretary General of the European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery for 9 years, President of CTSnet and member of the Board of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons and chairman of the International Cooperation committee of the STS in the USA.
Besides this he was member of the Editorial Board of the Annals of Thoracic Surgery and Eurointervention.
His clinical interests include aortic valve surgery, indications, outcome and innovations in percutaneous aortic and mitral valve replacement and repair, coronary surgery. He is also interested in education, and epidemiology. He is co-principal investigator of the SYNTAX and EXCEL trial (comparing coronary surgery with drug eluting stents) and member of the steering committee of the REPRISE III and SURTAVI trial on percutaneous valves and the RESHAPE trial: the evaluation of the Mitraclip in patients with heart failure. He was also member of the steering committee of the Realign trial on Dabigatran in patients with mechanical heart valves.
His current research efforts are focused on the evaluation of new surgical techniques and the comparison of new techniques in cardiothoracic surgery with new techniques in interventional cardiology. He is project leader of the ‘One valve for life” research program, a study together with the Technical University in Eindhoven and the University Hospital in Utrecht developing a tissue engineered heart valve.