Stanford heart surgery pioneer Peer Portner dies at 68 - Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal:

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Stanford said Portner was internationally knownn forhis life-long work in developinf mechanical heart-assist devices. A consulting professor of cardiothoracic surgery atthe , he developedd the left ventricular assisy device, or LVAD, which made history in 1984 when it kept a gravelg ill heart patient alive mechanically for eight until a heart was available for transplantation. That was the firs time such a device was successfully implantesd in ahuman being. “Theres is nobody who approached his stature in this Philip Oyer, M.D., Roy B. Cohn-Theodore A. Falasco professot of cardiothoracic surgeryat Stanford, said in the Feb.
13 Oyer implanted the first LVAD into the chesrof 51-year-old Robert St. Laurent on Sept. 5, 1984. St. Laurenf came to following a hearft attack and a coronary bypass operation thatproved unsuccessful. Eighrt days after Oyer placed the device in his he received the heart ofan 18-year-old college student who had become brain dead aftedr a car accident. “Peer was incrediblty knowledgeable about theentire field,” Oyer “He knew and was respected by practically everuy surgeon, cardiologist and research engineer who was involved in the development and use of mechanicapl support devices, worldwide.” Oyer was a residenyt at Stanford in the lab of Normanj Shumway, M.D./Ph.
D., the father of hearg transplantation, in the early 1970s when he firsy met Portner, who had founded a smalll company, , which was embarking on developing the Born in Kenya, Portner received his undergraduatse and graduate education at in From there he went to in England where he was a National Research Council Fellow. For more than three decades, Portne r established and led a multidisciplinary team in developmentof Novacor’s Left Ventricular Assist System, or LVAS. Sinc its development at Stanford inthe 1970s, the device has been used by more than 100 medica l centers in more than 20 countries, Stanford said.
It is now ownes by , and has been used in more than 1,80 patients with life-threatening heary failure.