NEWS RELEASES
4/12/04 News Release
PRINT MEDIA CONTACTS: Mitzi Baker at (650) 725-2106 ()
BROADCAST MEDIA CONTACTS: M.A. Malone at (650) 723-6912 ()
MEDIA ADVISORY:
FIRST RECIPIENT OF LIFE-SAVING DEVICE HONORED IN 20-YEAR MILESTONE AT STANFORD
STANFORD, Calif. – Twenty years ago, Robert St. Laurent, then 51, arrived at Stanford Hospital with a rapidly failing heart and no available donor for transplant. A team of cardiologists decided his desperate condition warranted a procedure that, up until then, had been tried only in animals: mechanically removing the workload from his heart by implanting a left ventricular assist device, or LVAD, to buy time until a suitable heart for transplant became available.
St. Laurent survived the procedure, gaining strength until a donor heart became available after eight days. He was the world’s first patient to receive the device, which was developed by Peer Portner, MD, a consulting professor of cardiothoracic surgery at Stanford. Philip Oyer, MD, the Roy B. Cohn-Theodore A. Falasco Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery, implanted the device. Since that time, more than 4,000 patients worldwide have benefited from this technology.
Two decades later, St. Laurent is returning to Stanford from his Florida home to reunite with the team that saved his life. He’ll be an honored guest at Stanford's annual heart, heart-lung and lung transplant reunion party April 14. The media are also invited to a press conference to meet St. Laurent and to talk with Portner, Oyer and Robert Robbins, MD, associate professor of cardiothoracic surgery and director of the heart-lung transplant program at Stanford Hospital. Robbins was recently named director of the Institute for Cardiovascular Medicine.
WHAT: Press conference with first LVAD patient followed by a reunion party of heart, heart-lung and lung transplant patients
WHO: LVAD patient Robert St. Laurent; Drs. Robert Robbins, Phil Oyer and Peer Portner will be available at the press conference; the reunion party will include LVAD and heart and heart-lung transplant patients, including former 49er Dean Moore and Mike Miraglia, whose story became national news when a California prison inmate received a heart initially destined for Miraglia
WHEN: Wednesday, April 14, 4 p.m. (press conference); 5 p.m. (reunion party)
WHERE: Lobby of the Falk Cardiovascular Research building (press conference); lobby of Fairchild Auditorium (party)
RSVP: Robert Dicks at (650) 497-8364 (Robert.Dicks@medcenter.stanford.edu)
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The Stanford University School of Medicine consistently ranks among the nation’s top 10 medical schools, integrating research, medical education, patient care and community service. For more news about the school, please visit http://mednews.stanford.edu. The medical school is part of Stanford Medicine, which includes Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. For information about all three, please visit http://stanfordmedicine.org/about/news.html.
