Ottavio Alfieri

Professor Ottavio Alfieri currently holds the position of Senior Consultant of the Department of Cardiac Surgery of Ospedale San Raffaele. He is the President of the Alfieri Heart Foundation, established to support research and innovation at the Ospedale San Raffaele. From 1996 to 2017, he was Director of the Department of Cardiac Surgery of the Ospedale San Raffaele in Milan and Professor of Cardiac Surgery at the Vita Salute San Raffaele University.

At the beginning of his career, he devoted himself to the treatment of congenital heart defects, first in Italy, in Bergamo, and then in the United States as a clinical fellow at Clinical Fellow al Children's Hospital in Buffalo, New York, and as a research associate at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His experience with adult cardiac surgery began in 1980 at the St. Antonius Hospital in Nieuwegein, the Netherlands, where he worked for 6 years in a team of surgeons. From 1982 to 1986 he was a visiting professor at the University of Gdansk (Poland). Returning to Italy in 1986, he became the Head of the Cardiac Surgery Department of the Spedali Civili in Brescia. Ten years later he moved to San Raffaele in Milan. He was an Associate Professor at: University of Brescia, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome, University of Pisa, and University of Bio-Medico Campus in Rome.

With more than 15,000 major cardiac surgeries, his main interest is the surgery of heart valve diseases, in particular mitral valve plasty. In the early 1990s, he developed the Edge-to-Edge technique (Alfieri mitral repair), an original method of mitral valve plasty, which is the basis of the most widely used percutaneous technology in the world for the correction of mitral insufficiency. The company has numerous patents for devices used to treat heart valve diseases. Over the past 15 years, he has actively promoted an interdisciplinary approach to the treatment of heart disease. In particular, he promoted the introduction of transcatheter technologies into everyday cardiac surgery practice.

He is the author or co-author of more than 600 peer-reviewed publications related to many areas of the cardiac surgery discipline, and the author of several books.

In 2011, he was President of the European Society of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (EACTS). In 2011, the Municipality of Milan awarded him the Ambrogino d'Oro Award. In 2012, he was Chairman of the task force on European guidelines for the treatment of heart valve diseases and coordinator for the revision in 2017. In 2018, he received a gold medal from the European Society of Cardiology for his scientific contribution in the field of cardiology. He is a member of ESC, EACTS, AATS, and STS.