HOAM THE HO-AM FOUNDATION

Dr. Seung-Jung Park is a clinician-researcher with stellar achievements in the field of coronary intervention. For more than 40 years, coronary artery bypass surgery was the only treatment option for patients with left main coronary artery diseases. However, this changed in 2008 when Dr. Park reported in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that percutaneous coronary stent treatment had comparable efficacy and safety to surgery. Dr. Park thus revolutionized the treatment modalities for left main coronary artery diseases and established new guidelines by demonstrating that the stent treatment was indeed noninferior to coronary artery bypass surgery in a follow-up randomized controlled trial published in the same journal in 2011.

Dr. Park also reported that compared with conventional angiography guidance, intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) guidance in coronary stenting was associated with a superior long-term clinical outcome. This finding shifted the guidelines of the European Heart Association to recommend that IVUS guidance be routinely used for complex stenting procedures. In addition, Dr. Park showed that unnecessary stent procedures can be effectively avoided by measuring the fractional flow reserve, which signifies the hemodynamic significance of a stenosis. Among Dr. Park’s most important achievements is his work published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015, which demonstrated that stents have comparable safety outcomes to surgery in patients with multivessel coronary artery diseases. Importantly, Dr. Park conclusively showed that the unconditional opening of asymptomatic coronary arteries with chronic total occlusion does not confer significant clinical benefits in patients.

Dr. Park strives to spread his knowledge and experience by organizing educational programs and conferences. Among them, the annual TCT-AP (Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics-Asia Pacific) summit held by Dr. Park and his team has a worldwide reputation as the representative international conference in the field of coronary intervention.

Dr. Park has continued to achieve outstanding achievements in the field of coronary intervention with outstanding personal competence, and significantly contributed to the establishment of new guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of coronary artery disease by successfully carrying out numerous multicenter, multinational clinical studies.