Orange Park, Florida, resident Elberta Jenkins underwent a triple bypass in 2008 following a heart attack. In 2020, two of her heart’s main valves started failing. While she needed another open-heart surgery to correct the valves, Jenkins could not get the operation. She was deemed inoperable due to her age, according to an Emory University press release.
“I remember feeling hopeless,” Jenkins, 82, said. “But then my doctor said that even though he had run out of options for me, his former instructor and mentor, Dr. Greenbaum, was practicing in Atlanta, and he might be able to help me.”
It was there, at Emory University Hospital Midtown’s Structural Heart & Valve Center, that Adam Greenbaum, M.D., and Vasilis Babaliaros, M.D., were working on something innovative and life saving.
The two doctors were “playing around” with a new method of cutting out heart muscle that involved an electrified wire at the end of a catheter, creating space for the placement of a new life-saving valve.
Since the procedure is non-evasive, it offered one last chance for Jenkins. In Jan. 2021, Greenbaum and Babaliaros performed the first ever Septal Scoring Along the Midline Endocardium (SESAME) procedure on Jenkins. Now she has the new heart valve she desperately needed.
Emory University called Greenbaum’s innovative technique — first practiced at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital in 2013 — the “birth of catheter electrosurgery.”
“Traditionally, someone might come up with a new idea and take it to industry,” Greenbaum said. “They’d have to develop and test prototypes going through the Food and Drug Administration, and it could take 10 to 15 years before that device or technique is available. But some people don’t have that time. That fact that we can, through our unique relationship with the NIH, offer patients novel solutions sometimes within a month or two can save lives.”
For people like Jenkins’ daughter Pyle, it means hope.
“Mom is a totally new person,” Pyle told Emory University. “I have not seen her feeling this well since before her open-heart surgery. She’s out enjoying life again — walking and hiking nearly every day. I’ve got my Mom back, and I couldn’t be happier.”
