Dr. Gordon Cohen: Getting to the Heart of Innovation
Dr. Gordon Cohen
If you ask Dr. Gordon Cohen why he has dedicated his career to working with children who suffer from end-stage heart failure, you’ll get a simple answer: it’s all about improving a child’s quality of life.
Cohen co-directs Seattle Children’s Heart Center, which is rapidly becoming one of the most innovative clinical heart transplant programs in the United States and which sees some of the highest numbers of patients. While most pediatric transplant programs operate on older children, the average age of heart transplant patients at Seattle Children’s is 1 year, proof of the center’s ability to handle complex neonatal and infant transplants.
In 2005, Cohen performed the first ABO-mismatched surgery in the western United States. By summer 2009, he had successfully performed eight of these procedures, including one on a 13-day-old, 7.5-pound infant. This was the first neonate in the region bridged to transplant on ECMO, a mechanical cardiac assist device that Cohen uses aggressively for very high–risk patients.
Cohen is also innovating ways to support weakened hearts while they recover from transplant surgery.
He is pioneering the use of an existing implantable ventricular assist device (VAD) for older children and developing a VAD for younger children. VADs offer the potential for children to recover at home after transplant. To date, no such device has been developed for children under 5 years of age. Cohen and his team modified a left VAD and demonstrated that they could provide total heart support to a patient with only one ventricle.
Recently, Cohen listed a fetus for a donor heart after Children’s cardiologists Drs. Chris Steffanelli and Mark Lewin made an in-utero diagnosis of a terminal heart condition. When a suitable match for a donor heart was found, the child was delivered via C-section at Seattle Children’s. Cohen and his surgical team went on to perform a successful ABO-mismatched transplant several hours after the infant’s birth, another giant step forward for the Heart Center.