Two decades ago, Chicagoans and nearby suburban residents with heart problems felt they needed to travel outside America’s third-largest city for world-class cardiovascular care. That perception changed in 2005, when Northwestern Medicine established the first-ever Heart Institute at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Emboldened by the vision and philanthropy of Neil Bluhm, in the form of a $10 million commitment, the Heart Institute became the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute.

Twenty years later, Chicago is now home to world-class cardiovascular care due in part to the Northwestern Medicine health system, which hosts one of the best heart programs in the nation — with cardiology and heart surgery consistently ranked in the top 10 in the country and heart surgery ranked among the top 20 programs in the world — and a scientific partnership with the Feinberg Cardiovascular and Renal Research Institute. As a result, Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute has become a destination for heart care — treating patients from more than 27 countries and 50 states.  

“We started with just one inpatient hospital cardiac surgery program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where we performed 275 heart operations a year,” said Patrick McCarthy, MD, executive director of Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute, the Heller-Sacks Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery, and professor of Surgery in the Division of Cardiac Surgery. “Now we provide care in eight inpatient hospitals across Chicagoland, performing 2,750 cardiac surgeries annually.” 

Celebrating its 20^th anniversary on Valentine’s Day, Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute has experienced exceptional growth over the past two decades. Starting with 37 physicians and fewer than 300 staff members, the institute now has 186 physicians and 2,400 staff members. New patient visits totaled 1,000 in the program’s first year; now nearly 50,000 new patients seek care there annually. That care includes a robust clinical research enterprise advancing from 150 study participants in 20 clinical studies in year one to more than 10,000 study participants in 100 trials, seven early-feasibility device trials, and 33 pivotal trials in 2023. This growth in clinical care and discovery science now positions Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute amid the leading heart and heart surgery programs in the country, pushing it closer to cementing a legacy. 

The institute also went from being unranked to currently ranking 7^th among cardiology programs in U.S. News and World Report, 2024 to 2025. This ascent into the country’s top tier of programs occurred within its first decade and hit an inflection point in the second decade. “Our upward trajectory occurred faster than we expected through collaboration, hard work, and community support,” said Charles Davidson, MD, ’85 GME, medical director of Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute, vice chair of clinical affairs for the Department of Medicine, and professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology.  

If there is a secret sauce, associate director of Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute Clyde Yancy, MD, chief of Cardiology in the Department of Medicine and the Magerstadt Professor of Medicine, credits several key ingredients. “It’s been a mix of recruiting talent, leveraging Northwestern stalwarts, cultivating an ethos of excellence, receiving unimaginable philanthropic support, and being guided by the vision of committed leadership,” Yancy said. “Today, the institute is on the precipice of the future of medicine.” 

PERFORMING TRAILBLAZING PROCEDURES

Pursuit of the best outcomes has driven advances in minimally invasive techniques to help save and extend countless lives. In 2008, Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute played a pivotal role in introducing a non-surgical transcatheter valve replacement procedure for the sickest patients with aortic stenosis. Participating in the pioneering Placement of Aortic Transcatheter Valve (PARTNER I) Trial, Northwestern was one of the nation’s first programs to offer transcatheter aortic valve replacement, or TAVR. Today, 80 percent of Northwestern Medicine patients undergo TAVR instead of an open procedure for aortic stenosis.   

Northwestern clinical investigators have also broken ground on the use of transcatheter tricuspid valve replacement. In early-feasibility studies, some of which were “first in [hu]man,” the initial findings led to an accelerated FDA approval of the technology in June 2024. This innovation may offer a viable alternative for patients with “leaky” tricuspid valves whose only option has been to take often-ineffective diuretics. Davidson and Akhil Narang, MD, associate professor of Medicine, coauthored the landmark study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, demonstrating superiority of transcatheter tricuspid valve to medical therapy. To date, Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute has performed more than 100 transcatheter tricuspid valve replacements.  

Despite the expansion of non-surgical approaches, some patients don’t qualify for these therapies because of the complexity of their conditions. Demand for skilled heart surgeons has steadily trended upward, and in 2023, Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute achieved a remarkable 32 percent growth over the previous year in cardiac surgery services. McCarthy receives referrals from cardiologists around the country and has performed more than 4,000 mitral operations in his career. A noted expert in complex mitral valve repair, he surgically treats atrial fibrillation—a condition that affects up to five million people in the United States and puts them at high risk for stroke—using the Cox-Maze procedure. The world’s second cardiac surgeon to perform this procedure, McCarthy was the first to combine it with mitral valve repair for patients with atrial fibrillation.  

Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute is also home to vascular surgery and nation-leading surgeons. Early adoption of minimally invasive aortic stent grafts greatly improved the outcomes of patients with serious aortic diseases, such as aneurysms and dissections. “Procedures that once required a lengthy recovery, are now performed using radiation-free techniques and just an overnight hospital stay,” said Mark Eskandari, MD, chief of the Division of Vascular Surgery and the James S. T. Yao Professor of Vascular Surgery and professor in the Departments of Medicine and Radiology. 

UNLEASHING THE POWER OF AI

“Despite a portfolio of breakthrough procedures and interventions, cardiovascular disease remains a compelling burden and cardiovascular health a persistent challenge in the United States,” Yancy said. “New approaches are necessary.” 

Collected daily, electronic patient records provide a treasure-trove of information that could help speed up the detection of cardiovascular issues. Among several breakthrough artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives at Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute, Northwestern scientists and physicians have built a machine learning model to identify patients with advanced heart failure. This AI algorithm looks at factors such as lab results, symptoms, and medications to calculate whether an individual has a life-or-death heart problem. Once identified, patients across the institute’s integrated network receive a referral for specialty care.  

“Augmented intelligence allows us to leverage big data to not only find patients at the right time but to also provide them with the right care,” said Jane Wilcox, MD, ’11 GME, associate chief of Cardiology in the Department of Medicine, and section chief of Heart Failure Treatment and Recovery at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, who led the machine learning initiative.  

So far, the AI-assisted model embedded in Northwestern Medicine clinical workflows has identified more than 80 patients who were directed into new access clinics, yielding some 800 patient encounters. These visits led to the identification of four patients with end-stage heart failure: Three received left ventricular assist devices to improve their hearts’ ability to better pump blood; one underwent heart transplantation. 

In late November 2024, Northwestern Medicine announced a collaboration with technology leader Tempus to explore the application of an AI-enabled care pathway platform in clinical care and research. Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute will deploy the Tempus ECG (electrocardiogram)-AF (atrial fibrillation) algorithm to identify patients with increased risk of developing atrial fibrillation. Northwestern will be the first provider to use this innovative technology in the clinical setting. 

DONNING A VARIETY OF WEARABLES

In 2022, Northwestern University received a National Institutes of Health grant to study the Apple Watch as a monitor for atrial fibrillation with the goal of reducing reliance on blood thinners. The approximately $37 million award went to Northwestern and Johns Hopkins to fund a seven-year trial known as the Rhythm Evaluation for AntiCoagulaTion (REACT-AF) trial. Started in July 2023, the wearable technology study is currently at 80 U.S. sites and has already enrolled 1,000 participants out of the goal of 5,400 patients, according to  Rod Passman, MD, director of Northwestern’s Center for Arrhythmia Research. 

An alignment with the Northwestern University McCormick School of Engineering Department of Biomedical Engineering has positioned the institute at the forefront of new diagnostics. Scientists are currently investigating a “Band-Aid” like biosensor developed by John Rogers, PhD, professor in the Departments of Dermatology and Neurological Surgery and in the McCormick School of Engineering, and his research group to identify and assess the severity of aortic stenosis. Placed on the chest, the biosensor surveils for valvular disease. “The long-term goal is to develop a low-cost and accessible approach to diagnosing valvular disease and assess its impact on patient outcomes and quality of life,” said Paul Cremer, MD, MS, associate professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology and the Department of Radiology. 

FROM CLINIC TO BENCH

Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute clinicians and scientists are working alongside Feinberg Cardiovascular and Renal Research Institute investigators (see sidebar) to tackle heart problems from every research angle. 

 “The ethos of the institute is to encourage faculty and staff to spread their wings and tackle cardiovascular disease from basic and translational studies all the way to clinical trials,” said Sanjiv Shah, ’00 MD, the Neil J. Stone, MD, Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology and director of  the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine’s Center for Deep Phenotyping & Precision Therapeutics. “We all have one common goal: to improve the health of patients through innovations ranging from new treatments and drug discovery to device development.” 

At the bench, Northwestern investigators are pushing the envelope further by engineering human heart tissues and developing cellular models of the human heart—in a dish. Taking blood cells from patients with genetic heart conditions, the team turns them into stem cells, which then can be further transformed into heart cells. In addition, to better understand heart disease, scientists recently created an electromechanically monitored engineered heart system and induced arrhythmias akin to what happens with cardiac diseases such as atrial fibrillation. “We think this platform will better model many heart diseases and reduce our reliance on the animal models now used in cardiac research,” said Dominic Fullenkamp, ’14 MD, ’12 PhD, ’16 ’21 GME, assistant professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology and first author of a recent paper published in Science Advances that presented the findings of this study. 

---

EXPLORE MORE

A POWERHOUSE PAIR

Established in 1988 with a generous gift from the Joseph and Bessie Feinberg Foundation, the Feinberg Cardiovascular and Renal Research Institute has pioneered cardiovascular basic science research for more than 36 years. Together with Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute, these Heart Institutes at Northwestern Medicine cover a broad spectrum of biomedical research and patient care. Led by Susan Quaggin, MD, the chair and Irving S. Cutter Professor of Medicine, and director of the Feinberg Cardiovascular and Renal Research Institute, scientists are unraveling the secrets of cardiac metabolism and aging, exploring how the blood and lymphatic vascular trees are formed and understanding their functions , developing novel therapies to improve transplant graft survival – including pancreatic islets to potentially cure diabetes, innovating new treatments for atrial fibrillation, and more.   

Feinberg Cardiovascular and Renal Research Institute currently includes three centers: the Center for Molecular Cardiology, led by director Hossein Ardaheli, MD, PhD, the Thomas D. Spies Professor of Cardiac Metabolism in the Departments of Medicine and Pharmacology; the Northwestern University George M. O’Brien Kidney Research Core Center (NU GoKidney), led by Quaggin; and the Center for Vascular and Developmental Biology, led by director Guillermo Oliver, PhD, the Thomas D. Spies Professor of Lymphatic Metabolism in the Department of Medicine.   

In the last 10 years, the Feinberg Cardiovascular and Renal Research Institute has seen significant growth including a tripling of the number of investigators. This evolution has not changed the institute’s core mission: to improve the quality of life of patients through creative basic and translational research and scholarship in the field of vascular medicine.