Andreas Grüntzig

In Zurich in September 1977, Grüntzig passed a balloon catheter into a narrowed left anterior descending coronary artery in a 38-year-old patient. Inflating the balloon widened the discrete blockage without opening the chest.

His original percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty compressed the obstruction using an inflatable balloon but left no permanent scaffold behind. Coronary stents were introduced later to hold the treated artery open and reduce abrupt closure or recurrent narrowing.

The catheter entered through an artery under local anesthesia, so the procedure did not require a sternotomy or heart-lung machine. This minimally invasive access was a central contrast with coronary bypass surgery.

Favaloro established his reproducible saphenous-vein coronary bypass method at the Cleveland Clinic in 1967. Grüntzig performed the first successful percutaneous coronary balloon angioplasty in Zurich a decade later, in 1977.