{"id":958,"date":"2021-03-16T23:04:49","date_gmt":"2021-03-16T23:04:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/learning\/?page_id=958"},"modified":"2025-05-11T23:46:01","modified_gmt":"2025-05-11T23:46:01","slug":"future-michael-acker-md","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/learning\/future-michael-acker-md\/","title":{"rendered":"The Future of Heart Valve Surgery with Dr. Michael Acker"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>During the past 25 years, the treatment of heart valve disease has radically transformed.\u00a0 New techniques, imaging capabilities and medical devices have greatly enhanced the patient experience with minimally-invasive procedures, shorter hospital stays, faster recovery and less pain.<\/p>\n<p>But&#8230; What will the future of heart valve therapy look like? Can it continue to advance? Or, has valve therapy reached an innovation plateau?<\/p>\n<p>To answer these questions, I interviewed <a href=\"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/surgeons\/dr-Michael-Acker-Philadelphia-Pennsylvania.php\">Dr. Michael Acker<\/a>, the Chief of Cardiovascular Surgery at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/hospital\/penn-medicine\">Penn Medicine Heart &amp; Vascular Institute<\/a>. During his 30-year career, Dr. Acker has performed 9,000+ cardiac procedures and 3,000+ heart valve operations. Dr. Acker has also been intimately involved with the research and development of many medical devices including TAVR.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/kf_-PD3lXu8\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2>Key Learnings from Dr. Acker<\/h2>\n<p>In this video interview, Dr. Acker touches on several great points about the evolution and the future of heart valve therapy &#8211; both repair and replacement. Here are the highlights I wrote down from our discussion:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Dr. Acker sees the improvement in valve therapy as an evolutionary process.\u00a0 There are typically no &#8220;light switch&#8221; innovations in medicine.\u00a0 Instead, physicians and medical companies typically build upon on previous successes, steps and failures.<\/li>\n<li>The utility of mitral valve repair techniques have experienced a renaissance during the past 30 years.\u00a0 Today, reproducible techniques have evolved to help patients benefit from mitral valve repair procedures.\u00a0The benefits of mitral valve repair operations include enhanced durability, freedom from re-operation, no anticoagulation therapy, and a normal life expectancy.<\/li>\n<li>The utility of smaller-and-smaller incisions to access a defective heart valve is an ongoing and important phenomena within heart valve surgery.\u00a0 Access points have decreased from a sternotomy to minimally-invasive ports to robot-assisted techniques. When appropriate, the size of an incision for a procedure can shift from inches to centimeters.<\/li>\n<li>Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) provides an interesting blueprint for how new technologies may impact patients with heart valve disease (e.g. aortic stenosis). While TAVR was initially limited to the highest risk patients, TAVR is now helping low-risk patients.\u00a0 At Penn Medicine, 80% of all aortic valve replacements are done using TAVR.<\/li>\n<li>With the success of TAVR, a current focus among physicians, researchers and industry is using catheter-based approaches to treat the mitral valve.<\/li>\n<li>While there is more complexity specific to using catheters to treat the mitral valve, Penn Medicine is currently evaluating transcatheter mitral valve repair (TMVr) devices including the MitraClip and transcatheter mitral valve replacement (TMVR) devices.<\/li>\n<li>In the next five years, Dr. Acker believes that TMVR is going to &#8220;take-off&#8221; as physicians may be able to replace mitral valves without opening the heart, without cardiopulmonary bypass and without using sutures.<\/li>\n<li>An underlying innovation resulting from medical advances within heart valve treatment is that newer techniques and technologies enable physicians to treat new patient populations that previously had no therapies available to them.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2>Thanks Dr. Acker &amp; Penn Medicine!<\/h2>\n<p>Many thanks to Dr. Acker for taking time away from his very busy practice to share these fantastic insights with our patient community. In addition, I&#8217;d like to thank Penn Medicine for taking care of so many patients in our community including Patricia Garcia, Michael Casey, and Theresa Gusset who Dr. Acker successfully operated on.<\/p>\n<p>Related Articles:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/surgeons\/dr-Michael-Acker-Philadelphia-Pennsylvania.php\">See Dr. Acker&#8217;s Interactive Surgeon Profile<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/hospital\/penn-medicine\">Explore the Penn Medicine Heart Valve Microsite<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/clinical-trials\/repair-mr\">Clinical Trial Alert: REPAIR MR Now Enrolling Mitral Valve Patients<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Keep on tickin!<br \/>\nAdam<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"cms.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"class_list":["post-958","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry","category-adams-updates"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/learning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/learning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/learning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/learning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/learning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=958"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/learning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5617,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/learning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/958\/revisions\/5617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/learning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heart-valve-surgery.com\/learning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}