How Did Julio Palmaz Help Hearts Around the World?

Each year, more than a million people benefit from stenting to treat narrowed or blocked arteries in their hearts. These procedures were made possible by National Inventors Hall of Fame^® Inductee Julio Palmaz, who invented the Palmaz Stent^®— the first commercially successful intravascular stent.

Read on to learn more about Palmaz and his impact.

A Determined Problem Solver

Palmaz was born in La Plata, Argentina, in 1945. At the National University of La Plata, he earned his medical degree in 1971 and began practicing vascular radiology at San Martin University Hospital. In 1977, he came to the U.S. to continue his training in radiology at the University of California, Davis.

At a conference in New Orleans in 1978, Palmaz found inspiration in a presentation given by Andreas Gruentzig, the inventor of balloon angioplasty (using a balloon to stretch open a narrowed or blocked artery). Gruentzig described the process of using a catheter to open blood vessels, but he noted that the vessels can still close afterward. Palmaz felt determined to solve this problem, and he began considering the possibility of using a scaffold-like object to hold vessels open. This initial idea would later lead to the Palmaz Stent.

“I call that being an intellectual rebel, the idea that you don't accept things as they are taught. You learn them, and then you challenge them to see if they can be improved or changed for the better,” Palmaz said in an interview with the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

“From the moment I had the idea of the stent, it became my pet project,” he said. “I decided at that point that this project was worth my best effort.”

A Promising Prototype

Using copper wire and a soldering iron, Palmaz began constructing prototypes of an implantable stent.

“This is something I always tell young kids who are developing an idea — that you can go on a theoretical basis a long way before you actually have to reach something that is practical. But in this particular case, I had to do things physically with my hands to be able to evolve the idea,” Palmaz explained.

His efforts resulted in a collapsible device that could expand inside a vessel and remain rigid enough to hold the vessel open.

Palmaz continued to develop his stent when he moved to San Antonio in 1983 and became chief of angiography and special procedures in the radiology department at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Here, he had access to more resources he could use to further perfect his idea, and he eventually succeeded in creating a prototype of a stainless steel, insertable mesh stent. His newly improved design could be expanded once inside the body to hold an artery open, allowing blood to flow more freely.

An Impactful Collaboration

In 1985, Palmaz began teaming up with cardiologist Richard Schatz at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas.

Schatz soon introduced Palmaz to his friend, restaurant entrepreneur Philip Romano, who provided funding for further research into the stent’s development. Palmaz subsequently pursued patents for his stent design.

Palmaz’s original design was a slotted straight tube of metal, which did not bend or flex. This made it suitable only for the straight vessels of the iliac or femoral arteries, and not the smaller, twisting and more delicate coronary arteries. The stent was then made smaller, making it flexible by creating connected “boxcar” segments. In 1994, the Palmaz-Schatz coronary stent was approved by the Food and Drug Administration based on two successful trials. Since then, these stents have helped doctors save and prolong many patients’ lives.

In 2019, the National Academy of Engineering noted that nearly 100 million patients worldwide have been treated with the Palmaz-Schatz coronary stent.

Palmaz’s inventive spirit did not end with the stent. At Palmaz Vineyards in Napa Valley, he and his family have applied the same curiosity and problem-solving mindset to winemaking. The winery’s underground facility was designed for gravity-flow winemaking, allowing grapes and wine to move through stages of production with less mechanical handling.

Today, the family continues to pair that traditional approach with advanced technology, including systems that monitor fermentation and provide real-time data. Their approach reflects the philosophy that has guided Palmaz throughout his career: understand how something works, question how it could work better and use innovation to turn an idea into reality.

See His Story

For an exclusive look into Palmaz’s life and legacy, watch this new video created by the National Inventors Hall of Fame in partnership with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

To learn more of our Inductees’ inspiring stories, keep exploring our website.