Amit N. Vora, MD, MPH, FACC, FSCAI

Amit N. Vora MD, MPH, is an interventional cardiologist and director of the Transcatheter Mitral Valve Program. He specializes in structural heart disease, which includes defects and disorders of the heart’s chambers, muscles, valves, and walls.

As an interventionalist, Dr. Vora performs catheter-based procedures that include complex coronary repairs and the placement of stents, offering many patients who otherwise might have had open heart surgery a minimally invasive procedure with a much quicker recovery. Additionally, he has particular expertise in transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), MitraClip, and Watchman left atrial appendage occlusion (for patients with atrial fibrillation that are not candidates for long-term blood thinners).

“What I like most about interventional cardiology—and specifically structural heart disease—is that it includes therapies that not only help people feel better, but also live longer,” Dr. Vora says. “We have therapies now that weren’t available even five years ago—and five or 10 years from now we expect the transcatheter approaches we’ll be able to offer to be far beyond what we can even imagine right now.”

Currently improvements in technology are making it possible to streamline procedures and offer innovations that include catheter-based heart valves in their third or fourth generation, he adds.

An assistant professor of cardiovascular medicine at Yale School of Medicine, Dr. Vora is also a researcher who has most recently worked on clinical trials to refine a mesh-like device used to protect major blood vessels during transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR). He says the device could prevent rare instances of stroke during the procedure.