In a world first, a team of researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Emory School of Medicine, Atlanta, has successfully performed a coronary artery bypass—a normally open-heart surgery—without cutting the chest wall. The team employed a novel intervention to prevent the blockage of a vital coronary artery, which is a very rare but often lethal complication following a heart-valve replacement. The results suggest that, in the future, a less traumatic alternative to open-heart surgery could become widely available for those at risk of coronary artery obstruction.

The work is published in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions.

“Achieving this required some out-of-the-box thinking, but I believe we developed a highly practical solution,” said first author of the study, Christopher Bruce, MBChB, an interventional cardiologist at WellSpan York Hospital and NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), as well as an adjunct assistant professor of cardiology at Emory School of Medicine.