Department Announces Naming of Translational Cardiothoracic Surgeon Scientist Visiting Professorship after Dr. Edward B. Stinson

May 9, 2024

The Stanford Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery is honored to announce the naming of the Translational Cardiothoracic Surgeon Scientist Visiting Professorship after Edward B. Stinson, MD. 

Dr. Stinson, a pioneer in heart transplantation, is a world-renowned cardiothoracic surgeon-scientist known for his groundbreaking clinical and translational research contributions to cardiac surgery. Alongside Norman E. Shumway, MD, PhD, he played a pivotal role in performing the first successful human heart transplant in the United States, and during his long career at Stanford, he contributed greatly to its position as a leading program in cardiothoracic surgery. 

Dr. Stinson was born in 1938 in San Diego, Calif. He received his bachelor's and medical degrees from Stanford University. After graduating in 1965, he trained in cardiovascular surgery at Stanford and joined the faculty in 1969. Throughout his career, Dr. Stinson was dedicated to pursuing innovative work at the intersection of surgery and cardiac research, and transforming discoveries into surgical interventions and treatments to improve patient outcomes.

From early on, Dr. Stinson’s clinical and translational research contributions impacted the heart transplant community. In 1965, he was a member of the research team that produced the classic paper evaluating experimental heart transplants in animal studies at Stanford Medicine led by Dr. Shumway. Findings from the laboratory experiments provided Dr. Stinson and the team crucial insights to their understanding of immunosuppression strategies and surgical techniques that were pivotal in shaping heart transplantation. The work demonstrated that the experimental heart transplant procedures could be successful and led the way for its eventual clinical adaptation at Stanford Medicine.

Dr. Stinson returned to Stanford and became the director of the heart transplantation program. In 1973, he also became the principal investigator of a prestigious grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the “Program Project” grant or PO1, for further work on heart and lung transplantation, a project that would span nearly 25 years. NIH PO1 grants fund multidisciplinary, long-term research programs directed toward solving a wide range of problems sharing a common central focus. Specifically, Dr. Stinson’s PO1 focused on both combined heart-lung transplantation as well as lung transplantation, with aims to improve donor organ procurement and graft preservation, refine intraoperative techniques and management, investigate the pathological and genetic features of cystic fibrosis patients, and to provide in-depth training to medical and surgical trainees from around the world.

Over the next several years, Drs. Shumway and Stinson, along with colleagues from all clinical disciplines, made numerous advances in the field that helped to increase the rate of success in heart and lung transplantation, including careful selection of donors and recipients, increasing the donor pool, improvements in post-transplant heart biopsies, and advances in immunosuppressive regimens to prevent rejection of the foreign organ, among other developments. 

Dr. Stinson authored several reports on early heart transplants and their later successes, as well as findings from other research endeavors and their clinical applications in the operating room. He was part of Stanford's team to first introduce the new immunosuppressive drug cyclosporine for heart transplantation at Stanford in late 1980, building upon their years of research in this area and ultimately successfully applying it into clinical treatment for transplant patients. 

He co-authored a seminal paper in 1970 on the management of acute aortic dissections, which established the widely used Stanford classification system for aortic dissection. This system classified aortic dissections into two groups, type A and type B, based on whether the ascending aorta is involved, regardless of the site of tear and the extent of dissection.

He also shared research interest in the application of hypothermia to cardiac surgery with Drs. Shumway and Griepp. In 1973, Drs. Griepp, Stinson, and Shumway described the protective effect of topical hypothermia for protecting the human heart during cardiac surgery. In 1975, they published a technique for total arch replacement using deep hypothermic circulatory arrest, an approach that became the standard for over two decades.