Issue link: https://tmcpulse.uberflip.com/i/1079661
11 t m c » p u l s e | f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 9 Cardiothoracic surgeon. Serial entrepreneur. Inventor. All of these titles apply to TODD ROSENGART, M.D. In 1997, he was part of the team that performed the world's first viral-based cardiac gene transfer procedure. Later, Rosengart co-founded Vitals.com, a website that allows patients to find and rate doctors, and then XyloCor Therapeutics, a startup that aims to use cardiac gene therapy to treat patients with end-stage coronary artery disease. A professor and chair of the Michael E. DeBakey Department of Surgery at Baylor College of Medicine and a professor of heart and vascular disease at the Texas Heart Institute, Rosengart also holds 12 United States patents. Q | What motivates you to create? A | I'm definitely a 'let's fix it' type of person and I want to make a difference. The work that I do on behalf of the department or the college— from fixing someone's heart or helping other surgeons—is very important. Q | Why do you think you became a medical problem solver? A | My dad passed away doing exercises when I was 16—from a heart attack. I came home from high school one day and there were ambulances in front of my house on Long Island. This is 1976. Bypass surgery is still relatively new. Even though my dad was a recently educated physician, an obstetrician, the news had not gotten to him— or at least in a way he understood—that he prob- ably could have had surgery and be alive today. Somehow, that was a disconnect. Subliminally, that concept of making sure people are well- informed has been very important to me. Q | How did your interest in fixing things lead to entrepreneurship? A | Operating is phenomenal, but being able to do something that helps many, many people with the same effort is really cool, too. When I was at Northwestern, one day I got a phone call—this is before Facebook and before cell phones—from an uncle who needed a cardiologist. I gave my uncle a name and I thought: 'This is so crazy. If my uncle had not called me, he would not have had access to good information about a good doctor. Why is this?' I helped start this company called Vitals.com. We created this website that had infor- mation on physicians all over the country to bet- ter communicate with people. It's very frustrating when people are forced to make decisions without information that should be readily available to them. So many bad things happen because we don't communicate well. It's been a very signifi- cant element of what I've tried to do, though I'm not really involved in Vitals anymore. ➟ Spotlight Q | Is this why you chose to become a heart specialist? A | Subconsciously, because he died of heart disease, I thought I was going to be a cardiolo- gist. I'm a big believer in serendipity. My mentor at Northwestern was the chief of cardiology— Michael Lesch, M.D., who co-discovered Lesch- Nyhan syndrome [ juvenile gout]—and he said: 'You're going to be a great cardiologist. I want you to spend the summer at NYU.' It was all a mistake because I did this as a second-year student and, typically, you don't do a clerkship until you're a third-year student. It took about a month before they figured out that I didn't belong there, at which point I'd really become a member of the team. By the end of the summer, I said: 'I love these surgeons. They're so cool. They do great things.' I went back to Northwestern and told Dr. Lesch I was going to be a heart surgeon rather than a cardiologist. I ended up going to NYU and starting my career there.