Mick Jagger owes a lot to Dr. Ajit Yoganathan (Dr. Y) for saving his life.
The 76-year-old rock icon underwent a heart valve replacement in the spring of 2019 in a New York City hospital – thanks to the safe and effective prosthetic heart valve developed by Dr. Yoganathan and his lab crew.
Dr. Yoganathan’s Cardiovascular Fluid Mechanics Laboratory has been serving as a heart valve approval lab for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for more than 40 years now. In 1979, he invented the scientific research of prosthetic heart valve engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
He and his team have been lauded for their profound influence on prosthetic heart valve designs, including one of the advanced models in Jagger’s chest.
Praising Dr. Y for his science, Ravi Bellamkonda, Dean of the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke, said, “To large heart valve companies, he’s a rock star.”
Former Chief Technology Officer at Abbott Laboratories Phil Ebeling said, “There just aren’t many people, frankly, in any industry with such universal name recognition and integrity.”
“Crossing the ‘Dr. Y’ threshold was always important. The ‘Dr. Y’ stamp of approval meant a lot,” added Ebeling.
Dr. Pedro del Nido from Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital said, “There’s no part of the world that I go to where people don’t know of him.” Dr. del Nido argued that Dr. Y’s revolutionizing of pediatric cardiac surgery has outweighed his heart valve accomplishments.
In Mick Jagger’s case, the prosthetic heart valve was inserted with an innovative procedure called “transcatheter valve replacement,” said Pail Citron, former vice president at Medtronic. Citron gave a lot of credit to Dr. Y for transcatheter valve development, adding, “His (Dr. Y) body of work contributed heavily to the transcatheter valve. His fingerprints are all over it.”
