By TCT Daily Staff

From its early days in the basement of the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., to its current size and success, the annual TCT symposium continues to surprise its own founder.

"I’m shocked," said Cardiovascular Research Foundation chairman emeritus Martin B. Leon, MD (left). "The meeting has taken on such a large scope."

The first TCT was conceived by Leon, who at that time was a senior investigator at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. He and his friends talked about creating such a meeting after the death in 1985 of interventionalist Andreas Gruentzig, MD, from the University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. Gruentzig was a pioneer in interventional cardiology, having performed the first coronary angioplasty and promoting the technique through live cases.

"But by the mid-1980s and following the death of Gruentzig, there was a significant drop in the use of that format. At the same time, there was the evolution of a whole new generation of devices," Leon said.

The goal of the first TCT in 1988 was to disseminate and evaluate burgeoning new technologies in catheter-based interventions. The attendance that first year was about 200, yet "the majority of the people in the audience ultimately … became leaders in interventional cardiology," Leon said in an interview.

Over the next five years, TCT grew steadily, in parallel with advances in interventional technology and research. The symposium showcased the steadily increasing technological sophistication and practitioner acceptance of stents, atherectomy, and IVUS.

"There isn’t a single device that we have used in the cath lab in the past 15 years that hasn’t in some shape, manner, or form been demonstrated … at TCT," Leon said.

International participation

Despite the investment in innovation, TCT was initially a U.S.-centered conference. In 1993, the organizers made a deliberate effort to encourage international participation with live case sessions transmitted from sites outside the United States, a first for a medical conference.

"People began to see things that they had never seen before, the many new devices that had not even appeared on the FDA’s horizon yet were being tested outside the United States," Leon said.

Over the next decade, use of transcatheter devices increased, bare-metal stents gave way to DES, and stent procedures moved beyond the coronary circulation.

"In the mid- and late-1990s, we really began to focus on TCT not becoming just a niche boutique meeting, but in fact the pre-eminent meeting for the entire space of interventional cardiology," Leon said.

Although some of the intimacy has been lost with the 60-fold growth in attendance over the years, the organizers continue to improve the meeting with, for example, the introduction this year of high-definition remote live case transmissions. And next year, for the first time, the meeting changes its venue from Washington to San Francisco.

（source：www.tctmd.com）