Ulrich Sigwart

In 1984, he performed the first coronary stent and 10 years later introduced percutaneous alcohol septal ablation, a non-surgical method for the treatment of hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy, as an alternative to open heart surgery.

[1] He was appointed junior consultant at the Gollwitzer-Meier Institute in Bad Oeynhausen in Germany in 1972,[1] and the following year was recruited to set up an invasive cardiology program, where he studied angiography.

[1] In 1978 he published his venia legendi thesis Die automatische Erfassung von Herzkatheterdaten (The Automatic Documentation of Cardiac Catheterisation Data) from Düsseldorf University.

These vascular stents, implanted in the peripheral and coronary circulation, were multi-filament self-expanding, spring-like devices made of surgical steel and produced by a small local company.

In 1987, after several years of preliminary work in animals, he published a landmark paper on the use of intravascular stents in humans to prevent occlusion and re-stenosis after angioplasty of coronary and peripheral arteries.

[9] Sigwart's work revolutionised angioplasty making it predictable, significantly improving the outcome and offering a chance to overcome the problem of abrupt closure and recurrence.