In 1985, Richard A. Schatz, MD, met Julio Palmaz, MD, PhD, who had fashioned a prototype of an arterial stent out of some metal in his garage.

“He had already done 100 animal implants, and I said, ‘This is wonderful,’” recalled Schatz. “I remember putting the stent in my hand and rolling it back and forth and thinking, ‘This thing is really going to work.’”

Palmaz was a “brilliant radiologist,” Schatz said. “But he had never played in the coronaries, so he needed somebody like me.”

The first stents required 14 painstaking hours of hand-tooling to make, according to Schatz. The pair shopped the idea around to device companies and universities but were turned down repeatedly.

Schatz remembers getting booed at a European conference when he presented animal data. “In Germany some guy stood up and said it was completely unethical. He said, ‘You shouldn’t be putting metal in coronaries. God didn’t intend that to happen.’”

Eventually, Schatz convinced Philip Romano, a golfing buddy and founder of the Fuddrucker’s hamburger chain, to invest $250,000. In 1987, Palmaz and Schatz licensed the product to Johnson & Johnson.

Later that year, working with Eduardo Sousa, MD, PhD, they im¬planted their stent for the first time in a patient in Sao Paolo, Brazil. “The case couldn’t have gone better,” Schatz said.

After extensive clinical trials, the Food and Drug Administration ap¬proved the Palmaz-Schatz stent in 1994.

“Someone from the audience would yell out, ‘Take the balloon down, deflate the balloon, you’re going to kill him.’”-- Richard Schatz, MD