O.H. Frazier, M.D., is chief of Cardiopulmonary Transplantation, program director and chief of the Center for Cardiac Support, and director of Cardiovascular Surgery Research at the Texas Heart Institute. He is also chief of the Transplant Service at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital. For more than 30 years, Dr. Frazier has been a pioneer in the treatment of severe heart failure and in the fields of heart transplantation and artificial devices that may be used either to substitute for or assist the pumping action of the human heart. As a result of his work, THI has become one of the top transplantation and mechanical circulatory support programs in the world. Dr. Frazier has performed over 1,200 heart transplants and implanted more than 900 left ventricular assist devices, more than any other surgeon in the world. Dr. Frazier’s interest in mechanical circulatory support began in 1969, when, as a student at Baylor College of Medicine, he wrote a research paper about the experimental total artificial heart, which was first implanted in 1969 by Dr. Denton Cooley. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Dr. Frazier continued experimental work toward developing an implantable left ventricular assist device (LVAD) to aid the failing heart, which he first implanted in 1986 with the HeartMate I; this device has become the most widely used implantable LVAD in the world. More recently, in 2011, Dr. Frazier implanted the first successful continuous-flow total artificial heart, using two second generation HeartMate II LVADs to replace a patient’s failing heart.

Dr. Billy Cohn is a cardiovascular surgeon and the Director of Minimally Invasive Surgical Technology at the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston, Texas. He is the co-director of the Cullen Cardiovascular Research Laboratory and an Associate Professor of Surgery at Baylor College of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at The University of Houston. Dr. Cohn received his undergraduate degree from Oberlin College, and received his medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine, where he remained for general surgical and cardiothoracic surgical residency training and where he served as the last chief resident under the legendary Michael DeBakey. After graduation, he took a teaching position at Harvard Medical School where he rose to the rank of Associate Professor of Surgery and served as an attending cardiothoracic surgeon and Director of Minimally Invasive Surgery at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center for eleven years. Now at the Texas Heart Institute, Dr. Cohn has a busy surgical practice, and is part of the surgical heart failure team which specializes in implantation of mechanical pumps to support the failing heart and heart transplantation. With a passion for medical device development, Dr. Cohn has more than 40 U.S. patents awarded or pending for his medical innovations and has been honored as the Distinguished Inventor of the Year by the Intellectual Property Owners Association. When he is not operating or inventing new medical devices, he can be found playing at local Houston bars with blues legend Little Joe Washington, or practicing close-up magic.