Dr. John G. Webb, MD FRCPC
Dr. John Webb and his colleagues at St. Paul’s Hospital are making open-heart surgery a thing of the past, saving the lives of patients not viable for conventional heart surgery.
Treatment of aortic valve disease remains a significant and growing unmet clinical need. Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement technology is designed to allow some patients, who may not be candidates for conventional open-heart valve replacement surgery due to excessive risk, to obtain a life-saving valve. TAVR devices may be implanted via multiple vascular routes (via the femoral artery – “transfemoral”, via the subclavian artery, or between the ribs via the apex of the heart – “transapical”) and is considered to be a minimally invasive procedure versus conventional open-heart valve surgery.
John Webb did his medical and specialty training at the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto. Subsequently he was Canadian Heart Foundation fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. In 1990 he returned to St. Paul’s Hospital which is affiliated with UBC and the designated heart center for the province of British Columbia.
Currently, he is director of interventional cardiology, the cardiac catheterization laboratories, the interventional fellowship training program and the interventional cardiology research group at St. Paul’s. He is an advisor to a number of biomedical companies and the government of Canada. Research interests include transcatheter management of structural and valvular disease and new device development. In 2008 Dr Webb was appointed the McLeod Professor of Heart Valve Intervention at UBC.
Dr Webb has over 200 publications in peer reviewed journals, including Circulation and the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. As leader of the first group to develop transarterial and transapical aortic valve implantation, as currently executed, Dr Webb has performed or supervised over 800 procedures in Vancouver and approximately 50 centers throughout North America, Europe, and Australasia.