Linnemeier Young Investigator Award Goes to Toby Rogers, BM BCh

Toby Rogers, BM BCh, has won the Thomas J. Linnemeier Spirit of Interventional Cardiology Young Investigator Award. 

The award was established in honor of Thomas J. Linnemeier, MD, who was Guidant Corporation’s senior vice president of New Ventures and chief medical officer of Vascular Intervention when he died in an accident in May 2002. He had formerly served as chief of the Indiana Heart Institute. Each year the award is given to a young interventional cardiologist who has shown both clinical and academic excellence.

“Winning this award is a great honor and … validates my decision to take time away from full-time clinical training to dedicate to research into novel transcatheter CV interventions,” Rogers told TCT Daily. “I am extremely proud of my work and in a small way, I hope that this award can convince other young investigators that it is possible to be innovative even at an early stage of their careers in interventional cardiology.”

Rogers is currently a research fellow at the CV intervention program of the NHLBI and an interventional fellow at MedStar Heart & Vascular Institute, Washington, DC. A British citizen, he received his undergraduate and medical degrees from the University of Oxford in England. He completed graduate training in general and interventional cardiology at various hospitals in England, most recently at King’s College Hospital in London. Along with his research in the U.S., Rogers is currently working toward a PhD in the department of imaging sciences and biomedical engineering at King’s College London.

Focus on innovation pays dividends 

While at the NHLBI, where he won the Director’s Award for outstanding clinical research in October 2013, Rogers has set his sights on developing novel interventions for structural heart disease. This effort has resulted in eight filed patents and four new techniques:

• Transatrial intrapericardial tricuspid annuloplasty for functional tricuspid regurgitation; 
• Direct transthoracic left atrial entry and closure to aid in the delivery of large prostheses to the mitral valve; 
• Direct myocardial chemoablation under direct real-time MRI guidance; and 
• Intentional right atrial exit and pericardial CO2 insufflation to improve the ease and safety of subxiphoid access to the dry pericardium for structural or electrophysiology procedures. 

That final technique was successfully tested in 12 patients undergoing subxiphoid suture ligation of the left atrial appendage. Rogers called that the biggest achievement up to this point in his career, which includes publication of more than a dozen peer-reviewed research papers in journals such as JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions, Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions, and Catheterization and Cardiovascular Interventions. He also has co-authored review articles, book chapters and editorials and has presented abstracts at several major medical meetings.

Moving forward, Rogers would like to find a balance between practicing clinical medicine and performing research. “Although I thoroughly enjoy research, I am first and foremost a physician,” he said. “I plan to subspecialize in structural heart intervention, and I would like to continue my research inventing new transcatheter devices and techniques, working to take them from bench to bedside.”

Rogers credits winning the Linnemeier Award to his mentors, Jonathan M. Hill, MBChB, MA, of King’s College London, and Robert J. Lederman, MD, chief of the CV intervention program at NHLBI.

“Dr. Hill inspired me to train in interventional cardiology and encouraged me to follow in his footsteps by moving to the United States to work at NIH,” Rogers said. “Dr. Lederman taught me to question conventional thinking. His daily question—‘What have you invented today?’—sums up his drive to innovate and tackle clinical problems for which contemporary solutions are inadequate or lacking.”

The other finalists for the Young Investigator Award were Ziad A. Ali, MBChB, DPhil, assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, New York, N.Y., and Marina Ureña, MD, an interventional cardiologist at the Hôpital Bichat-Claude Bernard, Paris, France.