"[5] To help his family get by in the late 1940s, Fogarty started working at Good Samaritan Hospital, beginning with cleaning medical equipment while he was in the eighth grade at school.
[6] He continued working during his high school summer vacations and was soon promoted to scrub technician, a person who handed medical instruments to surgeons – he witnessed his first surgery at a young age.
A family priest gave him a recommendation, and because of his awful grades, he was admitted to Cincinnati's Xavier University on probation.
During Fogarty’s years at Good Samaritan Hospital, he witnessed the deaths of many patients who died from complications in blood clot surgeries in their limbs.
I thought there must be a better way.”[8] Before Fogarty's invention, surgeons had to use forceps to remove the blood clots only after a huge part of an artery had been cut open, and the patient would be under general anesthesia for hours.
[9] At home, the ideas that went through Fogarty's head concerned different ways of making the procedure better, and he especially concentrated on avoiding the risky incisions.
As for the balloon, he basically cut off the tip of the pinky finger of a size 5 surgical latex glove and attempted to incorporate it onto the end of the catheter.
It even broke when he dragged it through glass tubes filled with Jell-o, a model he thought simulated a clot within an artery.
After some time, he figured out the type and thickness of rubber that was firm enough when inflated to extract a clot and still flexible enough to move through without breaking.
"[9] Dr. Cranley continued to encourage him, and soon, during his fellowship training at the University of Cincinnati in 1961 and 1962, Fogarty started to make the catheter system by hand for himself and for other vascular surgeons.
The balloon catheter is now[citation needed] used in over three hundred thousand procedures every year all over the world, and is estimated to have saved the lives and limbs of approximately twenty million patients.
The first balloon angioplasty, for example, was performed with a Fogarty catheter in 1965, and has led to over six hundred fifty thousand such operations per year.
One of his most successful products is the Stent-Graft, which dealt with the difficult problem of abdominal aortic aneurysms (a term referring to a weakened blood vessel).
The old method was to remove the bad part of a weakened blood vessel, but Fogarty's idea was to support it with an implant.
[8] In 1993, with Mark Wan and Wilfred Jaeger, he founded Three Arch Partners, a venture capital fund to invest in new technology and medical devices.
[12][16] He is associated with numerous medical technology companies and was appointed as an independent director to the Board of Pulse Biosciences in 2017.
It occupies forty-five hundred square feet of offices and engineering labs on the campus of El Camino Hospital.
The idea for the institution dates back to Fogarty's early life when he received encouragement from Dr. Jack Cranley.
We will teach how to address these challenges.”[5] Physician innovators, including Fogarty, serve as the faculty of the Institute and make use of their networks and experiences in the private industry to help those with projects that are ready for commercialization.
The younger Fogarty is widely credited for introducing a line of kosher-for-Passover sweet wines to the Portola Valley winemaking region.