Marco Barbanti, MD, Receives Linnemeier Young Investigator Award

Marco Barbanti, MD, was named winner of the Thomas J. Linnemeier Spirit of Interventional Cardiology Young Investigator Award on Monday in recognition of his academic and clinical distinction in the field of interventional cardiology.

The award was established in honor of the memory of Thomas J. Linnemeier, MD, who served as chief of the Indiana Heart Institute, senior vice president of New Ventures and chief medical officer of Vascular Intervention at Guidant Corp. Each year it is given to a young interventional cardiologist who has shown both clinical and academic excellence to help stimulate his or her continued commitment to outstanding patient care and ongoing academic inquiry. The winner receives a $10,000 scholarship.

“Winning this award is the crowning achievement of many efforts over all these years. I’m still young, and this represents the most amazing starting point that I could ever have thought for my career,” Barbanti told TCT Daily. “This award is also a source of pride for me because it shows that even in conditions in which the health care system allocates scarce funding for clinical research, you can reach important goals with commitment, willingness and good ideas.”

Barbanti is currently an interventional cardiologist in the division of cardiology at Ferrarotto Hospital in Catania, Italy.

Early success 

Barbanti earned a medical degree from the University of Catania Medical School in 2008. While undergoing 5 years of cardiology training to obtain a postgraduate diploma from the university, Barbanti spent a year in a combined clinical/research fellowship at St. Paul’s Hospital at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

While still in medical school, Barbanti began to focus on transcatheter heart valve intervention. In 2006, he joined a newly designated transcatheter heart valve team in Catania and was placed in charge of creating and handling local databases and managing and coordinating preprocedural screening of patients undergoing TAVR. At the same time, Barbanti began to write his first case reports and original research papers.

Barbanti has participated in more than 1,500 interventional procedures as primary or secondary operator including complex PCI, TAVR, MitraClip and other adult CHD therapies.

In addition to becoming a skilled operator, Barbanti also grew into an accomplished investigator. Only several years into his career, he is already an author on more than 80 published academic papers in journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, Circulation, European Heart Journal, and Journal of the American College of Cardiology. In addition, Barbanti has presented original reserch at many large cardiology meetings, including TCT.

Always more to learn 

Barbanti credits much of his early success to what he learned from two of his mentors: Corrado Tamburino, MD, PhD, of the University of Catania, and John G. Webb, MD, of the University of British Columbia. According to Barbanti, Tamburino taught him that “anything is possible,” and Webb showed him how to be “‘big’ while remaining humble.

“I have learned not to be ashamed to say, ‘I don’t know’ and how to listen to the opinion of others because there is always something more to learn,” Barbanti said.

Looking to the future, Barbanti hopes to remain in his home city of Catania and further contribute to improving the level of cardiology care available there.

The other finalists for the Young Investigator Award were Joost Daemen, MD, PhD, a cardiology fellow at Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and James M. McCabe, MD, assistant professor in the Division of Cardiology at the University of Washington, Seattle.