bios

John Coppola, MD, graduated from New York Medical College in 1978 and did a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in cardiology at St. Vincent’s Medical Center of New York. From 1983 until 1993, he was director of the CCU and served as program director of the Internal Medicine program from 1988 to 1994. In 1993, Dr. Coppola became the chief of the cardiac catheterization lab and program director of the interventional cardiology fellowship. In 2003, after traveling to Dr. Tejas Patel’s lab in India, he started the transradial program at St. Vincent’s. Since the start of the program, fellows in general cardiology and interventional cardiology are trained in both transradial and femoral angiography. The goal of the transradial program is to foster the development of radial angiography and interventions.


Sandeep Nathan, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and also serves as the director of the interventional cardiology fellowship program at the University of Chicago Medical Center. He completed his undergraduate and medical school training at Boston University, internal medicine residency at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and cardiovascular diseases/interventional cardiology fellowships at Rush-Presbyterian-St.Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago, IL. Dr. Nathan holds a master's degree in clinical research and currently serves as an investigator on several clinical trials focusing on the areas of platelet biology, interventional device therapies, intravascular imaging, and the use of antiplatelet and antithrombotic therapies in the management of acute coronary syndromes. Several years into practice, Dr. Nathan sought additional training in transradial angiography and has since shifted the majority of his coronary practice to this approach. Trainees in his program gain broad exposure to both femoral and radial approaches. Since its inception at the University of Chicago, the transradial program has positively impacted cath lab efficiency as well as safety and is being integrated into ongoing efforts to offer same-day discharge for a subset of patients undergoing PCI.


Samir B. Pancholy, MD, is Associate Professor of Medicine at The Commonwealth Medical College, Scranton, Pennsylvania. He attended medical school at B.J. Medical College in Ahmedabad, India. His residency was at S.U.N.Y at Stony Brook in Stony Brook, New York. Dr. Pancholy did his cardiology and interventional fellowships at the Presbyterian-University of Pennsylvania Medical Center. Dr. Pancholy has published research, including a number of studies on transradial access, in numerous peer-review journals. He has also taught courses on transradial technique.


Christopher T. Pyne, MD, is a staff interventional cardiologist at the Lahey Clinic Medical Center in Burlington, Massachusetts. He has actively trained fellows since joining the staff there in 1995. In 2003, Dr. Pyne began performing transradial angiography and intervention as his default approach. Over the ensuing 7 years, the use of this procedure at Lahey has steadily increased and is now performed by most operators at the medical center. Transradial training is an important part of the interventional fellowship, as well as an area of research. The laboratory has an interest in the use of transradial intertervention in ST-elevation myocardial infarction, with a particular interest in improving success rates and door-to-balloon times. Dr. Pyne has lectured extensively on the procedure throughout New England, as well as having recent data presentations at the Society of Cardiovascular Angiography & Interventions (SCAI) and American College of Cardiology meetings.


Sunil V. Rao, MD, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Duke University Medical Center, the Director of the Cardiac Catheterization Laboratories at the Durham VA Medical Center, and an Associate Editor of the American Heart Journal. His main research interests involve phase II clinical trials exploring pharmacological and interventional therapies for acute coronary syndromes, as well as bleeding and blood transfusion complications among patients with ischemic heart disease. Dr. Rao is the principal investigator (PI) of the ACROSS-Cypher trial of the Cypher drug-eluting stent in patients with chronic total coronary occlusions, the national PI of the phase II EMINENCE trial of the novel heparin M118 in PCI, and PI of the phase II INNOVATE-PCI trial of the novel antiplatelet agent PRT128 in percutaneous coronary intervention. In addition, he is a co-investigator on the NIH-funded REVEAL trial, which is a phase II randomized trial of intravenous erythropoietin in patients with acute ST-segment elevation MI, and a co-investigator on the American College of Cardiology-funded National Cardiovascular Data Regisry (ACC-NCDR). His research has been published in leading medical journals, including the American Heart Journal, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, and JAMA.